


White Heaven

by nikola



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-24
Updated: 2015-05-24
Packaged: 2018-03-31 23:41:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 42,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3997591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nikola/pseuds/nikola
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"That boy, who had such wild dreams and such strength – such beauty, shining against his mother's dark cottage, unbeatable, powerful, and madly in love with hope. She had been alive with him, she'd known, back then even as a little girl. When he left something died inside her, and she'd just been waiting for it to come back." Kind of AU. Cloud & Tifa</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Prologue

"Remember when we were, like, five, and – and you wouldn't tell me your name?" Tifa says suddenly, making him frown. "You kept telling me a different name every time I talked to you." Tifa remembers; he was Robby and Phil and Edin.

"How do you know," he says, turning his head to stare at the grayish sky again. They are lying on a wide field at the foot of the mountain. Summer isn't quite here yet, but the winds are slowing down and getting ready for it. "That it's my real name, this time?"

Cloud – it's his mother, voice faint, looking for her son. Cloud lives here, right where the mountains start, away from the town. Tifa raises her eyebrow.

"Unless you lied to your mother, too… " She says. Cloud shrugs, but doesn't get up. A light breeze tangles in their hairs, escapes and tickles their bare ankles next.

They don't say anything for a while. They are content, just to lie here, and listen to the whispers of early summer grass and the clouds, pregnant with rain about to fall. The air smells wet. Cloud, his mother calls again. Tifa turns her head.

"Don't you have to go?"

"She'll forget," Cloud says. "Give her a minute."

They listen to Mira calling, calling, and then she becomes quiet.

"How'd you know?" Tifa asks.

"I've had thirteen years of practice, haven't I?" Cloud says easily. He makes it sound like a skill, Tifa thinks, and wonders what it's like for him.

They feel the first raindrops, soft on their foreheads. Cloud starts to get up, but Tifa holds his wrist and pulls him back.

"I don't wanna go," she whines. "Mom's gonna make me practice piano."

"You spoiled child," Cloud says in mock seriousness. His eyes have a strange glint in them, like blue firestone sparkling something wild. Sometimes Tifa notices this. "You're lucky you have a piano."

"Yeah…" Tifa trails off. She feels a little guilty, but the wind is too playful on her cheeks and she doesn't want to go. "But I'm no good at music. I wish my mom would stop trying."

Cloud only laughs. Tifa remembers, how his long fingers fly deftly over the black and white keys so easily. On the day they first met, she remembers, he had been building the prettiest sand castle she'd ever seen. The autumn-stained orange leaf had draped over the wall like a victory flag.

"You gotta go, though," Cloud says after a while. "Your mom will be wondering where you are."

"I'll say I was with you – which is the truth." Tifa says. Cloud glances at her, and she can't figure out what he's thinking. She rarely can.

"Nah, tell her – tell her you were with Mace."

"Why should I lie?" Tifa asks, even though she knows. She's feeling stubborn today, a little sad too. She wishes she could play the wind like Cloud plays her piano.

Cloud rolls his eyes, but indulges her. "'Cause your mom wouldn't like it so much. And your dad will be – well, you know."

"He won't say anything," Tifa says petulantly. "He never says anything."

"No, but it's no secret."

"But – why? I don't get why my mom and dad always – "

"No one's really comfortable with me." Cloud muses, and it sounds like an observation, like he's talking about a boy in a storybook.

"I'm – " Tifa opens her mouth to protest, but Cloud says it for her.

"You're different. Haven't figured out why, yet." His eyes are narrow, pensive, studying her. Tifa feels heat rushing to her cheeks, where more soft raindrops slide soundlessly. Summer must be coming with rain, she thinks.

"I just, really liked your sand castle," Tifa murmurs. "And your hair."

"My hair?" Cloud sounds amused.

"Yeah, it's so – light. Almost white." Tifa touches the edge of his light-blond hair, just barely, and Cloud doesn't seem to notice. He's staring at the sky again, blinking when raindrops catch in his eyes.

Mira calls his name again. The sound is distant, melting into the wet air. She calls his name like they're playing hide-and-seek, and Tifa knows that's what Cloud will pretend, later.

"I guess it's because of my mom." Cloud says. He's answering her question. "She scares people."

Tifa thinks about Mira, and her smile; Cloud's mother is pretty, but she has a mind not quite right. She's overheard some women talking. She doesn't say this to Cloud. Tifa doesn't know what's wrong with Mira, just that she smiles too much; she smiles at the faces underwater, waves rolling back and forth, wetting her dress as she squats in the water.

"But that's your mom, not you." Tifa says, and realizes too late that she hasn't denied it. It shames her, but Cloud doesn't notice.

"Exactly. She's my mom. Plus, I don't have a dad."

"You have a dad," Tifa murmurs. "You just don't know him."

"That's the problem."

"Why?"

Cloud looks at her. There is it again, the flint – blue fire. She wonders what he's thinking.

"You're too young to know," he says finally. Tifa is indignant; she sits up, frowning at Cloud.

"You're only one year older than me."

Cloud laughs. "I was never too young for anything."

Tifa doesn't think that makes much sense, but she doesn't argue. There is something about the way Cloud laughs, a little too easily. She gets scared; she wonders if Mira used to laugh like this. She stands up and drags Cloud up with her. The rain is still just a drizzle, like a mist slowly seeping into their eyes. It is the kind of rain where you get wet without realizing it.

"C'mon, your mom's calling." Tifa says. "Race you to your house – "

She starts before Cloud has a time to catch up with her words. Cloud starts seconds late, and they leave laughter trailing behind them, like wet footprints in the air. Confused wind, soaked in the soft rain, meets her – explodes against her hair.

Robby, Phil, Edin. Cloud catches up with her, races ahead. Tifa is out of breath. Breathless, dazzled.

-

It's a small town and a small school. By lunchtime, Tifa hears that Cloud has landed himself in detention. She tries to see him, but he's nowhere to be found. There are talks, though, and pretty soon Tifa hears the story. One side of it, anyway. She figures she'll find out the truth later.

"I swear, he's a little cheater." Neve Hanson, who's supposed to be smart like his older brothers but really isn't, is saying loudly. Tifa listens, although she pretends not to.

"I knew it – he creeps me out," one of his friends say. "His mom's crazy."

"I hear it runs in the family," another boy speaks, and Tifa keeps quiet. They know she can hear them; but she's the mayor's daughter, and they can't bully her like they bully him.

"Doesn't matter if he's nutty or not," Neve grits his teeth. "He cheated on the test. I know it."

"How'd he get a detention?"

"Punched me in the face, that cabbagehead." Neve rubs his cheekbone, which is swelling up purple. Tifa wants to laugh. "An' all I told him was the truth, wasn't it?"

"Hey, Neve," Tifa calls, opening her textbook. The bell rings. "Maybe he's just smarter than you."

"Mind your own business, princess." Neve sneers.

"Did you tell him he cheated, because he got a better grade than you? Because that's just,"

"I told him the truth," there is a fake gentleness in Neve's voice, like he's being civil and respectable for her sake. "That he's mom's a whore."

Tifa doesn't speak for a while. She's afraid she might spit, like Neve Hanson did; but she doesn't say anything because Cloud really hates it when Tifa gets angry on his behalf.

"What, it's the truth," Neve is sneering again. "Why do you think they go to the city every month? 'Cause no one here will give them a job, 'cause this is a nice town. We got no place for – "

The teacher comes in then, and Neve stops talking. Tifa turns to the new chapter, stares at the letters on the page, but can't think anything beyond the bleached-out red and white in her head.

-

Summer comes and goes twice. Cloud never tells her where he's going with his mother once a month, and Tifa doesn't ask. She doesn't think it's important. She only feels a slight twitch somewhere (her heart, perhaps, if she ever lies awake thinking about that), because at least some of what Neve said is true – no one will give them a job, here. Tifa hates it.

The other kids think it's important, where Cloud goes with his mom and why. Tifa thinks that they have fun being disgusted, feeling clean. Cloud doesn't try to make them guilty, though. Tifa sometimes suspects that he encourages it, even. He gets good grades ; loses his tests and marked essays, usually where Neve Hanson can find it. Boys gang up on him, and Cloud fights back. He breaks Perry Bill's nose, and Perry's friend pushes him into the river. Cloud gets decorated with blue and purple and red, like colorful medals of a soldier. Tifa gets worried, sometimes, but he laughs if off. Acts like nothing can get to him, because everyone else is too far down and gravity must hold their ankles.

-

After school they sit together, work on their math homework. Tifa struggles with x, the independent minutes of silent struggle she looks through all of the numbers again, finds that she has multiplied the wrong six. She sighs, looks across at Cloud. The sun is setting and the creaky swing in Cloud's backyard is facing west. In the orange light of the dying day, his hair is dripping red like camellia flower, just before it dies. Cloud's math book lies abandoned on the seat between them, like a third party.

"Why aren't you doing your homework?" Tifa asks. Cloud looks up at that, and his eyes are dark in the sun. There is a fresh cut just below his left eye, and Tifa worries it's going to leave a scar. Cloud doesn't care.

"I'm finished."

"But you just started," Tifa says, trying to steal a glance. Cloud's handwriting is neat, almost mocking.

"Uh-huh. It's easy."

"Maybe for you," Tifa mutters. Cloud just grins. She tries to look again, the black journal on Cloud's lap. "What're you writing, then?"

"I'm not telling you," Cloud says, drawing it closer to his chest. Tifa pretends to pout.

"Is it poetry? Are you secretly writing sappy sonnets?"

"Do you even know what sonnets are?" Cloud teases, to distract her. Tifa considers this, decides she'll play along. There's nothing to consider, anyway; she always play along.

"Hey, I do pay attention," Tifa protests. Then adds, "sometimes."

"Six times seven is forty two, Tifa." Cloud says. Tifa realizes that he's been looking over her math. She covers it, suddenly embarrassed.

"I know," she says, but erases the number and does the calculation again with the new number. This time x isn't an endless decimal places. "I don't like math."

"Me neither." Cloud says. He starts writing again, Tifa tries to peek and gives up.

"You're really not going to tell me?" She tries again a little bit later, without much hope. Cloud glances at her and she notices that the sun has sunken lower into the horizon; it draws a darker shadow, a more brilliant shade of red over the curves of his face.

"I'm gonna be great one day, Tifa." He says instead of an answer. There is a distant look on his face, resting between his cheekbones, and Tifa is scared. For what, she doesn't know. She gulps it down. It isn't the right emotion.

"I know," she says. Her voice is steady and warm. Cloud smiles.

"I'm gonna get out, one day. Escape."

"Where?" She doesn't like to think about Cloud leaving, but she knows she won't stop him. Cloud closes his journal. It's an old journal, and Cloud writes small and tight to use it as long as possible.

"I dunno, anywhere. Out. Rusdar, maybe."

"That's a big city…" Tifa trails off. She doesn't trust herself to say anything else, so she just drops her head back to the homework. After a while, the sun sets completely and she can't see the letters anymore. Cloud walks her to the edge of the town, and Tifa walks home alone. She wishes it is poetry in Cloud's notebook, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick – so she can adore it and remember.

-

Years pass, and people seem to stay the same forever, day after day, only to change suddenly when you're not looking. There are only two classes in each grade but Tifa is never in the same class with Cloud. Her father is the mayor. Except Tifa sees him almost every day anyway, and she doesn't know what to call it; sixteen is confusing, all those rules and independent variables that aren't two times eight. She makes other friends, too. Cloud isn't her only friend but she is his. He keeps getting good grades, he keeps getting into fights, and Tifa's mother is worried. Her friends accept him; they pretend he doesn't exist. Tifa gives up fighting, or she doesn't try. But still, even at sixteen, children got bored.

"I am so sorry, about your necklace," Perry Bill is sniggering and not even trying that hard to hide it. "I hear it was beautiful."

"It was." Tifa says. She smiles too. She knows that he's stolen it, and he knows that she knows. This is a game they play. They can't bully her because of her father, like they bully Cloud because of his mother.

"Oh, well, maybe your boyfriend will buy you a new one." Perry says. "I hear he's got some money saved. God knows what he's done to get it – I heard – "

"Oh, good, Perry," Tifa says brightly. "At least your ears are working."

She leaves him at that. Perry is jealous, jealous of Cloud's easy victories. Tifa thinks she isn't too broken about that lost pearl necklace, except that it really was beautiful. It was a gift from her father. Thirty eight pearls, glistening and blindingly white on the silk string. She would have worn it to the dance with her blue dress; the color of a waterfall, Cloud had said. It was also the color of his eyes, but she didn't tell him that. She tells herself now that it doesn't matter. Cloud won't be there, anyway.

The bell rings. Someone shouts, and someone else cheers. There is a lot of noise, and above it all – she hears someone yell, it's the end.

"It's the beginning," Cloud says. They sit by the basketball court. Tifa wonders if it will be sunset forever, with him.

"It's the end," Tifa says. "Of middle school."

"School, period." Cloud is cheerful. "I'm not going to high school, remember?"

"Right," Tifa murmurs. She's never forgotten. She tries again. "So you're not going to the dance, then?"

"I'm not invited." Somewhere distant, kids are yelling excitedly. School is over. It's the beginning.

"Yeah, you are. Everybody is."

"That's what you think."

"I know it," Tifa says stubbornly. She feels anxious.

"Not welcome, then," Cloud rolls his eyes. "You know that, Tifa. But I'm free, now, and…" Tifa waits for him to continue, but he seems lost in his world. Tifa feels like getting lost with him. So maybe that's why, she thinks later, that she says what she hasn't meant to say; it slips out, permeates the air between them – orange, summer, like it always is.

"It's just that, my dad bought me a pearl necklace," she says. "And it's really pretty."

"Hmm?" Cloud murmurs. Tifa drops her head. "Nothing," she says, and watches the sun set over the faraway mountains.

"Hey, after the dance – " Cloud says suddenly. He isn't looking at her, so she looks at him instead. "Come by the playground. I got something to tell you."

Cloud doesn't have to tell her which playground it is; it's the broken playground behind an abandoned school where nobody goes, where they go sometimes to hide from the sun. Tifa feels her heart beat quickly. She wills it to slow down; what if he hears her?

"What is it?"

"Just somethin'. Will you come?" He looks at her then, and meets her with all the force in his blue-red eyes. Tifa can't say anything. She nods. "Good," he smiles. He doesn't tell her what he'll do during the dance hours, even when she asks.

-

Her friends ask her if she's feeling all right. Tifa doesn't hear them. Everything is so loud here – the music, the laughter, the glasses bubbling over with fancy juices – she tells them she needs to get some air. She stands in front of the school gate for a while, shivering. She didn't bring her coat and the late autumn grazes her bare arms. The heels are hurting her toes.

Before she knows it, she's running. White breaths fog up the air and it's loud again, through the trees and the empty fields, filled with ragged breaths and something that beats inside her ears. It echoes the feeling in her stomach, burning and cold at the same time.

"Hey, you're here early," Cloud says when he spots her. He looks surprised. "Where's your coat?"

"At the party." Tifa says, drops down beside him. Her waterfall dress inflates for a second, then dies. She takes off her heels. Cloud scoots over to make room for her, and they lean against a broken seesaw together, looking up at the stars.

"What're you doing here so early?" Tifa asks. Cloud shrugs. She thinks he might have been watching the stars. He would never admit it.

"Tifa, I'm leaving." He says, just like that, and steals something in her chest. For a while she can't speak, and feels a castle burning. The orange flags have caught fire. She feels cold, the wind suddenly biting, and crawls into herself.

"Where?" She manages. Her voice doesn't sound too broken, to her relief.

"I dunno. Probably Rusdar. Will you…" Cloud pauses. For a brief moment, Tifa imagines the impossible and Cloud saying, will you come with me? She blinks back something hot, stares at the milky way instead of his eyes.

"Will you be okay?" Cloud finally asks.

"Yes," Tifa says, and she doesn't know which question she's answering to. "You're gonna be great, Cloud."

"That's the plan." Cloud says, and there is a relieved smile in his voice. Tifa aches to hear it. "I'm gonna be famous. They won't know me there. They won't know my mom."

"What about your mom?" She asks, and Cloud flinches. She doesn't like the hope in her own voice, hopes he hasn't noticed it.

"She'll be okay. I've… there's someone in the city. I asked him to look after her."

"When are you leaving?"

"Tomorrow morning."

Tifa falls quiet. For a while they just sit quietly, and Tifa is hoping and dreading that the stars might spell out what she can't say.

"Oh, I almost forgot to ask," Cloud says suddenly, straightening up.

"What?"

"How many pearls were in your necklace?"

"What?" Tifa asks again, blinking. Cloud shrugs like it's the most natural question to ask.

"How many pearls in your necklace? Did you count them?"

"Yeah," she frowns. "Thirty eight. Why?"

"Damn," Cloud mutters. He looks up at the sky and blinks. Tifa watches him like a dream. Cloud shoves a hand inside his pocket and takes something out of it – things – her pearls.

"I went to the fields, 'cause I heard them talking… anyway, I only found thirty seven. Guess the other one must have been swept by the wind or something. Or maybe Perry Bill ate it." Cloud says as he takes her hand and carefully pours the small glistening pearls inside her palms. Tifa watches. She thinks she's forgotten how to speak. It takes a few tries.

"Thank you." She finally manages, without tears that would surely incriminate her. She would never be the same, she thinks. His eyes are so blue, and these pearls are so white. Every time she looks at the sky, the snow, the peak of the mountain she loves, she would think of him. Always.

"You're welcome," he says, and it is as if all the blue has slipped from the sky and seeped into his eyes, his smile, and the sky is left to remember – and to miss – for all of time. She would, too.


	2. Chapter 01

Chapter 01

 _This is for breakfast?_ She asks, wonderstruck.

 _Naturally. It's the best in the country_ , the woman assures her.  _Imported straight from the North. A hundred grapefruits, and one piece of dark chocolate._

_But that's where I'm from –_

The woman doesn't let her looks like someone she knows, with her dark curls and strange smiles.  _Come on, sit next to him, here, and watch the stars spell out his name._

_But that – then he will know._

_Tifa_ , he says, lips curling into a soft smile. There is a glow in his eyes, that's shaped like a grapefruit. He looks amused.

 _Why are you smiling?_ She asks, and he is about to answer.

-

The alarm clock wakes her.

She lies still for a while, blinking up at the ceiling. There is a damp spot to the left. It must have rained last night – but she isn't thinking about that. She tries to remember the dream, but the shrill screech of the alarm is distracting. She sits up to turn it off, and by the time she slings her legs to the side of the mattress, the dream is safely hidden behind a wall in her mind, disappeared like it was never there in the first place. It is a strong wall, sturdy and white and impenetrable, except when she is sleeping. Sometimes memories and images slip out, then, and sometimes – a few of them stay behind. She takes them in her hands, the few she has, and collects them like a queen collects pearls, emeralds, diamonds. She adds two to her collection, this morning; the endless pile of grapefruit – and him, looking at her, amused. She can't remember why he was amused. Perhaps she'd never known.

Tifa shakes off the blanket. It's getting too warm now, to cuddle into the blanket. Summer is lurking around the corner like an uninvited guest, the occasional rain something like a warning. Tifa has grown to hate summer, over the last five years, and she doesn't like to speculate about the reason. She turns on the radio.

…  _marks the thirty first battle, and the third to have …_

…  _thirty percent chance of rain today, folks, so you better …_

…  _a thousand mirrors told your name …_

Her fingers stop. She doesn't recognize the singer, his voice raspy and uncut, but she likes how the melody weaves itself into the air quietly. So she leaves it on as she gets changed for work.

She is rather startled by the dream, she thinks, because she hasn't thought about him in – well, she would say  _years_ , except it isn't true. She thinks about him more than she likes to remember.

Tifa had tried not to remember, that first and second year he left; and when it became apparent that he would never come back. She didn't like the empty fields, the empty sky. Then she got swept up, things happened seemingly without reason and even that emptiness was taken away, like it was too good for her to have. It was arbitrary, Tifa thinks, everything that's happened. She wouldn't have imagined this life for herself all those years ago; she wonders if he's changed at all. Wonders, if five years isn't long enough to dull the blue in his eyes. There was a small scar just below his left eye, and she wonders if that has faded – or if there is a new one, now, and if the brittle gold of his hair has drained. She sees her own reflection in the mirror and thinks, _maybe,_ water splashes on dry face,  _maybe not._

When she left that town in the middle of the night those years ago, he became the only thing that was left; left of, left from. Except she does not know; she does not know how much he has changed, if the soft lines of his face have hardened, stuck in a question, like hers has.

 _It has been long enough,_ Tifa thinks, staring at herself.  _To forget your voice._

She doesn't like to remember, but it has somehow become the only thing that is left. She tells herself that she isn't limping but collects and admires the colors of her dreams.

…  _a thousand mirrors told you name, think you were never that late …_

-

Her days begin early and end late. All day, Tifa deals with young mothers trying to find the perfect shade of pink for their baby princesses, little girls who don't like the lace on their collars – or not enough lace, never enough pearls. She smiles for all of them and coaxes them into trying on the new line in the catalogue. Mostly her customers leave satisfied. She is good at her job.

At the end of her morning shift, Tifa walks two stories down to the ground floor. This is where perfumes entwine themselves around each other like velvet snakes and soft silk scarves. The radiance of the diamonds and gold is blinding, if you catch the light at the wrong angle. Tifa walks quickly to where Jessie is selling teardrop-shaped emeralds. There is only one customer, a girl who looks about Tifa's age, bending over the glass counters and studying the deep blue sapphire bracelet. Jessie spots Tifa from where she's sitting on a stool made of cardboard boxes.

"Tifa! Sorry, the next shift's not here yet," she says with an apologetic flash at her wristwatch.

"That's okay. I can wait." Tifa says, pretending to look at earrings on the counter.

"No, no, you don't have to. Hey, Aerith – " Jessie addresses the customer. She looks up, and Tifa isn't surprised to find that she has pretty, round eyes and lips the perfect shade of cherry to match her soft ginger curls. Her features are in perfect harmony like an well-orchestrated play. Tifa looks away, too tired to be bitter.

"Yeah?" Aerith says.

"You okay by yourself awhile? The next shift'll be here soon."

"Of course," she smiles.

"You didn't have to do that. I can wait." Tifa whispers as Jessie takes her purse from beneath the counter. "Are you sure you want to leave her here all alone?"

"She'll be okay." Jessie says. "I know her. She's our VIP customer."

"VIP, huh," Tifa mutters. She glances back to where Aerith is now trying on some earrings. Tiny pearls dangle down like snowflakes. They look beautiful on her. She stands there humming a melody from the shop speakers. She reminds Tifa of a future that never got lived. Tifa looks away.

"Yeah, comes in here at least once a week. Buys a lot but just, I dunno, looks at stuff a lot too."

"And the manager lets her?" Tifa frowns. Jessie shrugs.

"The stuff she buys, they could pay for my… I don't know, everything."

Tifa doesn't have anything to say to that. They squeeze out of the crowd and into the streets, where people sweep past them like a school of small colorful fish. No one pays them much attention.

"Sandwiches?" Jessie asks, heading for the small sandwich café at the corner. Tifa huffs in weary amusement. "Like we never get anything else?"

"So what's eating you?" Jessie asks, as they sit down in their usual window seat. Tifa unwraps the usual chicken corn sandwich slowly.

"Nothing," she says. "Just a weird dream, that's all."

"About what, rats?"

Tifa pauses. Frowns, and Jessie is brushing her hair out of her eyes. It's hot, but there is no air-conditioning. "Why would you say that?" She asks.

"I don't know," Jessie shrugs. She bites into her sandwich. "So what was it about?"

Tifa hesitates for a moment. She isn't sure if she is allowed to say his name, then doesn't know why she shouldn't. "Cloud," she says.

"Who's that?"

"Remember that boy I told you about – from my hometown?" Tifa shrugs to make it casual.

"You mean the one you had a major crush on?"

"I never said – "

"So what about him, exactly?" Jessie cuts off her protest with a roll of her eyes. "Tell me you're not still waiting for him."

"Waiting for him?" Tifa blinks at her. It has never crossed her mind – it's just,  _waiting_ is such an indefinite verb. "No, of course not. I don't even know where he is." She distracts herself with her sandwich. It tastes of stale lettuce and dry canned corns.

"Huh," Jessie says. "I thought he was here in the city." She is looking at Tifa like she's trying to figure her out. Tifa avoids her stare, looks out at the street instead. The early summer sun is drenching heads in bright yellow. No sound passes through the dirty glass and it feels like a dream, people talking and laughing silently.

"No, I don't know where he is," Tifa says. "Why did you think that?"

"Never mind. I just thought that's why you were here in Midgar. I mean, you're not here to study, so."

Tifa says nothing to that. She doesn't want to remember, but his words are what remains of that sand castle, and she knows what he said.  _That's a big city,_ she'd said, and she hadn't known exactly how  _big,_ until now. The city is a beast that breathes and devours, gray buildings and brick sidewalks, silver cars and yellow sunlight that pours over them all. She misses the mountain and the grass fields; even though they were empty, after.

"No, I just came here because of what happened." Tifa says, and Jessie doesn't ask her to explain. She knows Tifa is from Nibelheim. It all had been static, silence and then – screams – she stops remembering. She looks out the window again. Blond hair, brown hair, a limp, a smile that doesn't look fake.

"Why are you always doing that?" Jessie asks; suddenly, it seems to Tifa. The silence had her in a comfortable embrace.

"Doing what?"

"You're always – looking out the window. Looking at everything. Like you're looking for something." Jessie pauses, chews her sandwich. "Or someone."

"I don' t know," Tifa says, thinking that she should have been more careful; should've been guarding that wall more rigorously.

"Just – whatever's worrying you, Tifa, just try not to think about it." Jessie says.

"Does that work?" Tifa asks, dubious. Jessie doesn't answer, just laughs. Tifa wonders if she will recognize that bitterness in her laugh when she has fumbled through a couple more years. She thinks she will probably still have the same job – maybe moved on to a manager, even – and then tries not to think about it. It doesn't really work, and she stares out at the window again.

-

In winter, Tifa usually has a glimpse of the first stars as she walks back home. Not now, though, and Tifa hates summer. It hasn't entirely arrived yet, and the sky is stuck somewhere between day and evening like a girl deciding on what color dress to wear. Tifa has started the ten-minute walk to her apartment, when someone calls her name.

"Tifa?"

Tifa turns around to find a guy smiling at her expectantly. She vaguely recognizes him from the children's shoes department. The dying day – it has made up its mind now, with an orange tantrum – casts strange shadows on his face and Tifa imagines light blond hair instead of golden brown, just for a second.

"Yeah?"

"Tifa, from girls' clothes section, right?"

"Yeah. And you're," Tifa tries to remember. A name tag, she must have seen it a hundred times. "Trevor?"

"Close," the guy bursts into a pleasant laughter. "It's Biggs, though."

"Well, that wasn't even close. I'm sorry, I'm just really bad with…"

"That's okay." Trevor – no,  _Biggs_ – shrugs it off but Tifa feels heat rush to her face. She mumbles another apology, suddenly wishing she was home. Air-conditioning or not, at least she's free to sink into herself there. Maybe find out what that song was, from the radio this morning. It hasn't left her head all day. Tifa is distracted again. Biggs is saying something, and she has realized it a beat too late. No wonder she doesn't remember his name – reality means little to her, it seems, when grapefruits are only a thing of her dreams.

" … so what do you think?"

"What?" Tifa hesitates, sees a fleeting look of confusion in Biggs's eyes, and decides to pretend. "Yes. Yeah. Good."

"Good." Biggs grins widely, and she gives a little smile on her own. She wonders what she had agreed to. He starts walking confidently to the other direction and Tifa follows him.

It turns out that Tifa is buying Biggs a glass of beer, to apologize for her negligence. A glass quickly turns into two, and then three.  _You're a dreamy type, aren't you,_ Biggs says, and Tifa just smiles.

"I'm distracted easily, I suppose."

"See, I noticed that about you. You just look like… sometimes…" Biggs sips the golden liquid, waving his other hand in search of a word. Friday night, the bar is rich with bursting colors and noises. "Lost? No, just, looking for something else."

"Aren't we all?" Tifa takes a sip herself. The beer is warm, slides down her throat easily. She wishes it was numbingly cold.

"Wow, that… that's, deep." Biggs shakes his head a little. Tifa laughs despite herself.

"Are you drunk already? It hasn't been thirty minutes."

"No, I'm not… I'm not drunk. It's totally been, like, two hours. And I'm just sayin', Tifa, I'd really like to… be your friend."

"Hmm," Tifa hides her eyes behind another gulp of beer. She doesn't know what to say, except that she would tell him sorry if she only knew why.

"I got no ulterior motives," Biggs defends himself valorously. "It's just that, you seem to have no friends."

Tifa wonders if she should be offended, but that seems to be too many layers of pretending. Besides, Biggs is blinking his eyes hard and it looks funny, like a goldfish trying to speak.

"I have friends," Tifa says. "I got Jessie."

"Jessie? Women's jewelry?" Biggs slurs a little. Tifa watches him frown in concentration. "She's not your friend."

"What do you know?" Tifa doesn't snap, not exactly, but there is a current of sting and Biggs startles. He seems to be reconsidering his words, shakes his head quickly.

"No, wait, I didn't mean… I mean, there are talks."

"Talks?" Tifa drinks some more. Her head does not spin, but she wishes it would. Spin itself to some poetic death.

"On her wrists, I mean… you haven't been here long, Tifa, and before your time, there was another, girl."

Tifa lets Biggs talk, doesn't meet his eyes. Biggs is oblivious to the strange beatings in her ears.

"After she left, I heard she tried to… I don't know, no one knows, but, I'm telling you, that girl is dangerous. She's not right, in the head." Biggs looks proud, like he has accomplished something. Tifa gets curious. She pushes the half-piece of information about Jessie to a corner in her mind, probably never to be looked at again. She finds that she does not care, and that she has always noticed the almost-healed scars on her wrists. It is Biggs she is curious about, though.

"So what're you planning to do with your life, then?" She asks, without a preamble. Sober, Biggs might have frowned.

"Oh, I'm gonna… I'm gonna be great one day."

It brings an unexpected pain, familiar and not yet healed. Tifa doesn't think her voice would be distant enough, but maybe Biggs is too drunk to notice.

"Doing what?" She asks.

"Gonna be a lawyer. Yup, that's right. One day."

"Never heard of a lawyer selling babies' underwear." She mutters. It's fascinating to watch Biggs sit up a little taller when he pronounces  _one day,_ like savoring wine on the tip of his tongue.

" _Shoes,_ thank you, and this… this's only temporary. See, I gotta pay for the next term."

"Hmm."

"And what about you? What're your,  _dreams_?"

"Why do you say it like that?" Tifa avoids answering, takes another sip. The bitterness is not bitter at all, and she imagines fruits instead of barley.

"Say what? Like what?" Biggs looks confused.

" _Dream_ , like it's… like it's God." Tifa wonders if she is a little drunk after all. She hasn't meant to say that at all.  _God,_ it is a word she doesn't use very often.

"Oh. I didn't realize… but it's important, right? Sort of like God."

"I don't think it's important." Tifa murmurs.

"What, dream? Or God?"

Tifa doesn't answer. Thinks that  _he_ used to hold on to his dream like the last salvation, and where did that land him? Tifa is amused that she doesn't know. The promise, the city, the dream.  _I'm gonna be great one day,_ and it's like an echo.

"So," Biggs tries again. "Is this temporary for you too? What're you gonna do with the money you saved?"

"What could I do?" Tifa wonders.

"Anything. You're like, what, twenty? Hell, you could do anything you wanted and still have enough time to regret it. Go travelling around the world."

"I like your optimism." Tifa observes. "But I can't leave. I'm waiting." Her words surprise her. She thinks about it. It's the white wall, cracking, paint peeling off.

Biggs makes a noise that sounds like  _for what_ , and Tifa answers the empty air that used to be Biggs's head.

"For something to happen," she says. She thinks, in the sudden wave of dizziness, that she's meant to say  _salvation_ – but she doesn't like it; it sounds too desperate. Besides, she doesn't even know if there is such a thing.

_-_

_One, two, three. They fall like music. Beats, one, two, three. And then back._

_Like magic, the three taps, and there isn't time to open an umbrella. Rain has strange colors here. Strange smells, that is not quite fragrant but reminds you of flowers all the same. Musk roses. Explosions, implosions, lovely smiles. The world becomes poetic, and lines of a poem slip out of your head like sour milk. Drips to the floor and forms a puddle around something very still, like a photograph, but then – blink, one, two, three, and the dance is starting all over again. You have never liked to dance. It's funny, now, in the midst of all the laughter, you suddenly want to fly._

_Winds have strange tastes here, like a myth, like a dream, like a –_

-

The next day, Biggs is embarrassed. He claims to have no memories of passing out, and the barman dragging him upright. Tifa catching him a taxi and paying the driver extra money. Tifa feels a little guilty about just sending him off like that; times like these, you had to look out for yourself. But she had been tired, very tired.

"It was supposed to be a beautiful, budding friendship thing," he moans. "And I've ruined it."

"Don't worry about it," Tifa says. "I'm just glad that the taxi driver didn't sell your liver or anything." To which Biggs says nothing, and Tifa walks back to her corner. The shop is still waking up, plastic sheets being lifted and the smell of cleaning product still strong in the air. It is Tifa's favorite time of the day. Customers early in the morning are different; more careful, more deliberate. Not that she gets many customers in her section early on. Except, this morning, she gets an unusual customer.

"Can I help you, sir?" Tifa asks, placing her smile, straightening her collar. The young man, who's been looking around the store with a lost expression, starts and turns around. He's wearing a soldier's uniform; the top button has fallen out, and his hair is longer than it should be. Tifa realizes where he's been, and it freezes her smile in place.

"Sorry – " he apologizes. "Didn't see you there. Uh, are you… do you work here?"

Tifa doesn't point out that she is wearing the uniform that says  _Midgar's_. She merely nods, and smiles.

"Obviously," the soldier laughs a little uncertainly. He has a nice laugh, although his eyes are tired. "You're wearing the uniform. What am I saying."

"If you're looking for the men's section, it's…" Tifa starts to say, but the man shakes his head and walks a few steps toward her. Tifa notices that he has a limp; probably why he was discharged and sent home, but she doesn't mention that. She acts like the rest and pretends that the war isn't going on.

"No, actually I'm looking for little girls' clothes." He shifts a little closer, dragging his left leg. Callous fingers brush tiny satin dresses, and it's such an alien sight that Tifa looks away.

"Daughter?"

"What?" The man lifts his head, his mouth dropping. "Do I seriously look old enough to have a daughter?"

"Uh," Tifa blinks. He looks offended. "Maybe. Honestly, I can't tell."

"Fair enough." The indignation slips, and he breaks into a sudden laughter. "You'll have to excuse me. Just got back from the war."

"I figured," Tifa says as nonchalantly as she can. Usually, she acts like the rest, but the war isn't something you forget.

"It's for my cousin. She turns seven, tomorrow."

Tifa smiles. It's where she's supposed to. She starts to flip through the catalogue, but thinks better of it. She simply picks out a dress from the  _sales_ rack and hands it to him.

"All little girls love it," she tells him. The soldier nods gratefully.

"Thanks – you have siblings?"

"No." Tifa says. "Always wished I did, though." She slips the dress into a plastic bag.

"Hey," the soldier is frowning. "You feel familiar. Have we met?"

Tifa shakes her head, hands him the plastic bag. The soldier takes it absently, but he's still staring at Tifa. She wishes he would go. He is a reminder of a war that she can usually pretend to forget. Reminder of –

"No, but, are you sure? Maybe we're from the same town." He insists. "I'm from a really backwater town."

"Are you saying I look like a country girl?" Tifa tries to sound playfully offended, but suddenly her heart is beating too fast. She stares at the curve of his face, his eyelashes, the way he straightens his shoulders. She has always thought that she would know instantly; their eyes would meet, she would recognize the blue fire and it would scald her like it had always. She wonders if she has been wrong. The soldier has blue eyes, not as clear as  _his_ , but she could be remembering the wrong color. Maybe it had been the sky that was so blue.

"Where are you from?" Tifa asks, feeling distant.

"I'm from Gongaga," he says.

She feels deflated. Suddenly she is weary, of the indifferent lights in the shop, about the war that she remembers. The man is looking at her intently. Tifa shakes her head.

"I'm from Nibelheim."

"Nibelheim? But that's – " He doesn't finish. He looks sorry, almost, like it was him that bombed the village; early days of the war, when the borders shifted daily.

"Where is Gongaga, anyway? I've never heard of it." Tifa is relieved her voice doesn't sound distraught. She even manages to sound genuinely curious. The soldier laughs in kind of a long-suffering embarrassment, like he has heard this question one too many times.

"You wouldn't. It's a tiny village in the North." He waves it off. "Must have been terrible, though. I heard – I heard it was,"

"I wasn't there." Tifa says. She wishes he would go. "My dad sent me away right before the worst bits."

"Your dad…"

"Died. So did everyone else."

The soldier flinches, guiltily, and Tifa wonders why that is. Maybe he was there. Maybe he tried to stop the blue-white explosions and couldn't. She has given up blaming anybody a long time ago, though, and she could have told him that but she doesn't.

"Sorry." He looks like he wants to say something else, but she isn't looking at him. Eventually he shifts the shopping back awkwardly to the other hand, and walks away.

-

Zack remembers Nibelheim. He shudders. The sun hasn't quite warmed up yet, and the air is gray and cold. It looks like rain but he hopes it doesn't. Nibelheim is also familiar for something else, but he can't put his finger on it. Outside, Cloud is waiting. He stands up and picks up their bags from where he's been sitting in front of a big red sculpture. Of what, Zack doesn't know.

"You got it okay?" Cloud asks. Hands him his bag, and Zack takes it.

"Yeah – wanna see?"

"No." Cloud says, and Zack chuckles. Then he remembers;

"Hey, didn't you say you were from Nibelheim?"

"Yeah," Cloud narrows his eyes suspiciously. "Didn't think you'd remember."

"I didn't, exactly, it's just that there's a girl there – " Zack jerks his thumb to the department store at their backs. "Who's also from Nibelheim."

"Huh," Cloud says. He spares a perfunctory glance at the shop, but doesn't say anything else. He starts walking to the station, so Zack follows.

For a while they walk in silence. It's early in the morning, but not so early that people are going to work. There aren't a lot of people outside. Zack is glad for that.

"You think it's gonna rain?" Zack asks, craning his neck to peer at the sky. The clouds are dark and low.

"Yeah." Cloud answers. Zack puts on a theatrical sigh.

"Damn, it's a long way, though."

"There's this thing," Cloud says mildly, "called umbrella. Real handy."

Zack has to laugh again. He shakes his head, dispersing the laughter between one wet air and the other. "What would I do without you, Cloud."

"Go home," Cloud says a little airily, like he really  _knows_ , and Zack flinches. "Get a real life."

"What about you?" Zack asks. "Where are you going?"

"The station." Cloud says. Zack doesn't say  _that's not what I meant_. For a while more they walk in silence, until they arrive at the train station. Zack checks the timetable. Announcements echo through the big hall, and tired-looking people with big luggage haunt the plastic seats. They sit down because there's still time until the train that will take him to Serlain. Zack notices Cloud looking absently ahead, his fingers tapping on his knees.

"What's that?"

"What?" Cloud turns his head.

"That – the taps. Why do you do that?" Then adds, after a little pause. "You've been doing that for days."

"I have?" Cloud raises his eyebrows. He studies his own fingers like they belong to someone else with leprosy, and are falling apart. "I didn't realize."

"Yeah, you keep doing the three taps."

"I guess it stuck with me," Cloud shrugs. Before Zack can ask again, his train is announced and they get up at the same time.

"So," Zack says, wondering what could be the proper last words. He feels awkward suddenly; even though they have built death together, Cloud and him. He sticks out his hand like they are meeting for the first time. They are doing it completely backwards. Cloud looks at his hand, takes it slowly.

"I've been… you've been – " Zack starts to say, feeling anxious, but Cloud smiles; suddenly, without any fuss. Zack feels himself slowly smiling too. He pulls Cloud into a hug. They don't say anything, and after a while Cloud lets go first.

"Goodbye, Zack," he tells him.

As Zack settles into his seat in an empty cubicle, carefully arranging his stuff in the seat next to him, he thinks about Cloud. He will probably never see him again, he thinks. They have built death together but life is something that has to stand on its own; at least for them. Zack feels something he hasn't expected to feel, at least not so soon. He feels guilty; he apologizes to Cloud. Only he would never know it, and all the better for that. Zack leans back and closes his eyes. It is a long way to Serlain, and even longer from there.

_Goodbye, Zack._

He hasn't expected to hear that name on someone else's lips, and it sounds wrong. He wishes he had told Cloud, but it has always been too late. From the moment they met, because they did it all backwards and said their goodbye before the hello.


	3. Chapter 02

Chapter 02

-

"Tifa," Scarlet, the manager, is a short woman, with an immaculate face and lips painted in fuchsia. "Have you heard from Jessie?"

"No." Tifa looks up, frowning. "She hasn't come to work today?"

"I'm afraid not." Scarlet looks unhappy. She curls her lips and straightens a dress on a clothes hanger, flips pointlessly through a bunch of tiny blouses. Across the floor, Tifa sees Biggs looking at them curiously.

"I'll give her a call," she tells Scarlet. Scarlet shakes her head.

"Tried that, she isn't answering. Well," Scarlet straightens up. She gives a smile, stretching and cracking the thick lipstick like cracks like dry ground. "Someone else will have to cover for her, I suppose."

"Maybe she's in the hospital, emergency room or something." Tifa says, fear slowly spooling out in her head. Images of hospitals, white gowns and tired faces flash on her mind.

"Yes. Maybe. Or maybe she's just tired again." Scarlet says. Tifa doesn't understand, and looks blankly at Scarlet. Eventually Scarlet walks away with the clicks of her heels. Tifa tries to put words to the jumbled pictures dancing in her head, but someone wanders into her section and she turns around with a welcoming smile.

"Good day, ma'am, can I help you?"

-

"What was that about, with the manager?" Biggs is curious. "Are you in trouble?"

"No, it's Jessie – " Tifa says, rummaging through her purse to see if she has remembered everything. "She hasn't come to work today."

"You're going over to her house?" Biggs asks. Tifa slings the purse on her shoulder. Her head is full, it seems, with the images and colors that still don't make much sense. There are equal parts red and white, and the smell too. She's not sure if she wants to remember the smell.

"What about your shift?" Biggs asks again, when Tifa doesn't answer. She is distracted. She shakes her head.

"I talked to Scarlet. Look, I'm worried – "

"So am I. But Tifa, maybe you shouldn't go alone…"

"Why not?" Tifa looks at Biggs, at his golden-brown eyes, and he looks nervously back at her. Suddenly the images make more sense. She doesn't fashion it with articulate words, though, and neither does Biggs. Tifa hurries out of the store with her head full of white and red, the smell of metal and factory rain.

Jessie's place is a small, damp room near her own. It has started to drizzle outside, and the entire building looks heavy under the faint raindrops. Tifa walks three stories up to Jessie's room. She knocks. Behind the door, there is no sound.

"Jessie? Jessie, it's Tifa." She calls, listens hard, but there is no sound. Not even soft breaths, no dying footsteps.

The house is empty. Tifa tells herself that the house is empty.

She calls and knocks for more than thirty minutes. Then she squats against Jessie's door for another hour or so, in case she's just gone out to get some fruits, but eventually she has to leave. Tifa thinks about leaving a note under the door, but doesn't. She isn't sure what she would say.

It is only when she's already locked her own door behind her that Tifa remembers; she has a copied key to Jessie's apartment. She doesn't know why she hadn't remembered. The metal-scented images come to her mind again, a slowly forming puddle around something very still; like a photograph. But then –

Her phone rings.

" _Tifa?"_ It's Jessie. Tifa grabs her phone so tightly that her fingers hurt, but she's sliding down against her door before she knows it.

"Jessie, are you okay? I was so worried."

" _Sorry. I'm okay now."_ Jessie sounds the same as ever, a light layer of granite hiding something dark and soft, something to burrow into.

"What happened? Were you sick? Did you go to the hospital?" Relief makes her voice fast. Jessie doesn't speak for a beat. Tifa imagines the puddle again. She wonders if she should be running to Jessie's apartment right now, but it is like Jessie reads her mind.

" _There's no use going to my apartment. I've left, already."_

"Left? Left – what do you mean?" She imagines a dress that flourishes around Jessie, red, silk, soft and full of adoring whispers – like a queen. The dress as a sticky quality to it, heavy and dark.

" _Just, needed to clear my head for a bit."_ Jessie pauses.  _"Hey, Tifa, can I ask you something?"_

"Of course." Tifa says. She concentrates on Jessie's voice. Looks for a crack, but it's smooth and easy. If Biggs hadn't told her yesterday, she wouldn't have thought to look for a faint almost-healed scar on her wrists. Or if she did, she wouldn't have been remembering it now.

" _It's a weird question,"_ Jessie warns. She almost sounds playful. " _But – do you believe in God?"_

"You know I don't." Tifa says. "You know what happened."

" _Yeah, I know you can't believe in someone who let it… all happen."_ They had talked about this, late into the night, sitting on the riverbank with their feet dangling and stars silently watching. It feels like a long time ago. Tifa blinks.

"What are you saying, Jessie? Where are you? Let me come and –"

" _No, really, Tifa, I'm okay. I've just been thinking, that's all."_

"About what?" About red silk dresses, about the strange smell in the air, about the fire that licked over her dead father's face. He had crumbled, succumbed. He had seemed so invincible.

" _What if,"_ Jessie starts to say, but pauses. Tifa waits without saying anything.  _"No, actually, never mind. I just wish I had one."_

"You wish you had what?" Tifa asks.

" _God, you know."_ Jessie sounds easy. Her voice is smooth. She makes it sound like a joke. The phone is getting hot inside her palms, and her ear hurts from pressing it too hard. She changes the ear, as quickly as she can, but when she listens again the phone is disconnected. Tifa tries dialing back but Jessie has turned it off. Tifa listens to the operator's voice for a while. Eventually she has to hang up.

-

Tifa finds that she can't sleep, that night. She lies on the bed and stares at the gray, damp ceiling, because she can't think of anything else to do. Time is strange in the space of a sleepless night. It's not that it moves slowly; it doesn't seem to move at all. It calls the darkness, the stars, the dreams under its wings and spreads, covers, nests. It stays with her.. She isn't even thinking about anything in particular. She doesn't want to put words to it, so they remain just vague colors. Sleep doesn't really come, but dreams and darkness mingle anyway and the night makes it hard to distinguish between black and indigo and magenta. Tifa gets up.

She is surprised at the faint light that simmers outside her window. She checks her watch, and it's four thirty; the washed-out light of the morning sun illuminates the city white. She might as well get up now. She thinks she will go outside. Tifa washes, grabs her bag and locks the door behind her. It's two hours earlier than when she normally comes out, and she feels awkward in the silence.

Outside, the morning is crisp and clean, and little sparrows flutter away from her footsteps. She wanders into the town but there aren't many places she can go. The shutters are down in shops. There are a couple of street cleaners wearing orange caps.

Tifa wanders into a back street she has never been before. She notices a small cross hanging from a house on the far left. For a moment she doesn't recognize what it is; it is not a house at all, but a small church.

Tifa walks past it, then stops. There isn't anywhere else she can go at this hour, and she remembers Jessie asking;  _do you believe in God?_ No, she cannot say she does, but she goes inside the church anyway. It's dark and barely lit by a candle beneath a wooden statue. She sits on the edge of a green plastic chair at the back row. The small praying room – Tifa doesn't even know the proper name of the place – is dark, dimly lit, and she is alone. Even the silence is wooden, here, and she feels a little out of place.

 _Now what,_ Tifa thinks. She stares at the statue for a while. It is of a man; though she supposes it isn't really a  _man_ , but God. He just looks like a man. Tifa's eyes wander to the tapestry behind the statue. It's hard to make out in the flickering shadows of the candle, but there are women in blue and green dresses, gray and white wings, and Tifa assumes they are what is called an angel. There hadn't been that many religious people in Nibelheim, but one of her friend's mother had prayed every morning and evening (a lot of good it did her, in the end), and Tifa had been fascinated once. Remembering it now, she brings her hands together and starts talking to the angels in her head.

She doesn't know how to talk, though, and wonders if she's doing it right. She tries to tell them about Jessie; she tries to tell them about the dream she had and the place she's at, which is somewhere in-between. She doesn't hear the answer – didn't expect a counseling, but maybe – maybe a feeling. The distinct feeling of being listened to, of someone else tasting your story and trying on your shoes; even if they cannot, quite, know the reason you can't meet their eyes. Tifa is thinking of Cloud again, and she makes herself stop.

Also, it's no use talking to the angels; Tifa can tell that there is no one there, and she's talking to the membranes of her eyes. She thinks it is hard to believe in God if there is no proof of Him, or his angels. Only if you are so desperate that you will believe the sky is yellow if you have to. Tifa gets inexplicably frustrated; she doesn't trust herself for walking into a church, or sitting down and trying to pray. She gets up, abruptly, to leave and her purse clatters to the floor. The zipper is open and everything spills out. Tifa lets out a sigh and bends forward to pick up her things. Her card, wallet, a pack of tissues and crumpled receipts, a dried black ball pen –

Tifa pauses. She notices something that she doesn't remember putting in her bag; it is a string, something sturdy used for sewing up army suits. On the string are small white pearls; exactly thirty seven. She stares at it, confused. Slowly, reluctantly, she remembers tucking it into the inner pocket of her purse, and zipping it tight; but can't remember the reason. It must have broken, the zipper, and now the pearl necklace (it isn't even a necklace anymore, just a string with pearls) lies on the floor. Tifa picks it up carefully. The knot hasn't come undone; she'd made sure, after the last time, that it was tight.

The solid feel of the pearls in her palms is alien. It's smooth and sleek, the shadows are merely darker shades of white, and the reflections don't seem to be of this world. They are inanimate objects.

Suddenly, with the clarity of something like dawn light, she finds that she misses Cloud. It's breathtaking, the intensity of her emotion in that moment. Tifa pushes the pearls back into her bag, hurriedly, and shoves the rest of her things inside too. She walks out, misses a step and almost falls forward. Cloud is gone – he's gone away, never came back, though he'd promised; she'd waited and sewn the pearls back onto a string, but he hadn't come back. Then the village burned, and Tifa is in Midgar.  _Why Midgar_? She doesn't want to know. She doesn't want to think anymore, and the phone rings. There is only one person who would call her at this hour; she flips it open hurriedly.

"Jessie?"

Jessie doesn't say anything for a moment or two, but Tifa knows it's her.

" _Tifa, I'm going,"_ she finally says. Her voice is calm, quiet. Tifa glances at her watch; it's five forty-five.

"What do you mean you're going? You're going where?"

" _Away. I found the necklace…"_

"What?" Tifa's hands freeze. She feels cold, heavy. "What necklace?"

" _Hers. Doesn't matter, now, but I can't live here."_

"Whose?" Tifa asks, suddenly desperate, but Jessie doesn't answer. Tifa imagines this is the girl Biggs told her about,  _the girl before_ , and she doesn't know what's happened to her. To them. She doesn't even know who this is. She feels sick, for her apathy and for her desperation. It feels like  _her_ failure.  _Her_ failure that she couldn't keep them near her, safe, happy. Always out of reach, peering and admiring from a distance, never brave enough to love properly. "Jessie, just tell me where you are."

" _Train station."_ Jessie answers easily.  _"Just wanted to say goodbye."_

"But…" Tifa starts running to the station. The dawn is warming up, slowly. "Can't we talk? Can I… are you coming back?"

She feels like crying, but her voice remains appallingly flat. She wants to tell Jessie that she loves her, but can't. Even if that was the one thing that might save her, she can't.  _I don't want to be him_ , she thinks, and it surprises her.

" _I don't think so, Tifa."_ Jessie's voice is soft. Still so calm, and not a trace of her usual bitterness. It is the serenity she associates with the most devout, the transcended. Tifa asks Jessie if she has found God. Jessie chuckles.

" _If there is God,"_ Jessie says.  _"He's not here."_

With that, she hangs up. Tifa stares at the phone for a while, realizes she's stopped, and starts running again. Her own necklace, the thirty seven pearls, rattle in her purse. The wind has gotten noticeably heavier, and it leaves handprints on her cheeks; she runs.

She arrives at the station just as the first trains are leaving. She stops in front of the big neon board. A few destinations flicker, turn to the time, then back. She doesn't know which one Jessie might be in. She thinks, vaguely, that she is glad not to have to check. The station is echoing with announcements, silent noises of the early morning travelers, and not a place you can find God. At least now, she can pretend to know for sure that Jessie is on one of those trains, heading for a better place. Tifa turns away, suddenly tired.

She has a half-mind to take out the pearl necklace and drop it into the tin can in front of that homeless woman; but something Jessie said keeps her hands locked.  _I found a necklace._ It makes her uneasy that she has, as well, maybe even at the same moment. She can't help wonder; she doesn't let herself hope, but keeps the necklace anyway. She drops a couple of coins in the can instead. The homeless woman drops her head.

Next to the woman, someone is sleeping on the hard bench of the station. The tiles he leans on are cold, and the wood must be hurting his back, but he either doesn't care or has no other choice. Tifa only stops because he has a soldier's uniform on; a cap is covering his face, but Tifa wonders if it is that young soldier from Gongaga. Except there is no plastic bagnear him. Their heights are a little different, anyway, and it must be another soldier just returned from the war. Tifa averts her eyes. She starts walking back to the store, figures she could get there a bit early and start organizing the size tags, which she had meant to do for ages.

-

There is blood, mixed with the rain, and it smells like metal and ocean. There is a lot of blood. Cloud takes another roll of bandages from his backpack. The rain had made it soggy, and it makes slurping sounds as he lets it fall. There is a gush of wind from over the mountains, and the trees shake. The raindrops fall sideways. The blood diffuses in the air like a spray of paint, coloring the wind red. Cloud spits some more out into the air, which accepts it reluctantly and turns it into a fireshow.

"You a medic?" The man squirms beneath him, struggling to open his eyes. Rain is getting in the way. Cloud keeps pressing the bandage on the man's stomach. He looks too dazed to be in pain.

"No," he tells him. "But I know you're gonna bleed to death soon."

"That is so reassuring," the man mutters and attempts to grin. His stomach doesn't agree, and he coughs blood weakly. Cloud stares at the man's face like he's trying to memorize it.

"Am I going to die?" The man wonders, when the cough has subsided. Cloud settles back against the tree, which is screaming and laughing with the wind and the rain. He shrugs.

"Probably."

"Great. Thanks."

"If it's any consolation," Cloud tells him, "I'm probably gonna die, too."

"Why would that be a consolation?" The man asks. He tries to make it sound indignant. Cloud shrugs again.

"I dunno, just making poetry."

"Where are we?" The man tries to raise his head, but the pain makes him groan and drop his head back down again.

"Enemy territory," Cloud says simply. "I dragged you to this little hill, and they haven't spotted us yet. But we're losing, so it's a matter of time."

Something in his voice makes the man frown, and he opens his eyes to slits again.

"Hey, kid, how old are you?"

"I don't know." It surprises him, if only slightly, that he really doesn't know. The rain is messing with his head, and he feels a headache coming. When he opens his mouth the winds all rush inside his nose and mouth, so he feels like he might explode, and it tastes of blood. "It's been a few years."

"Well," the man seems to be considering what to say. "Thanks, I guess."

"For what?"

"For – you tried to save me." The man narrows his eyes. "Why? I mean, it's the war and everything."

"I know that." Cloud says, suddenly angry. "As I said, it's been a few years for me."

"I just meant, you're usually too busy watching out for yourself." The man says hurriedly, trying to appease him. Cloud slumps back, the anger gone as suddenly as it came.

"I dunno. You were rattling on about something." He says vaguely, and leaves it at that.

"Well, thanks anyway. Even if we're probably gonna die real soon."

"Sure."

They sit in silence for a while. It is a silence marred by howling wind and rain, flashes of bombs somewhere beyond the hills, a lot of blood, a lot of faint screams – or is he imagining the screams? Surely they are far enough away. The man had been rattling on about home, the one thing they are not allowed to remember because it is a drug; it is a slow, glorious death. They are allowed to talk about it, but they are just not allowed to remember. The man has his eyes closed, and his chest is moving up and down slightly; but he looks dead already. A red puddle is forming where blood seeps out beneath the bandage, and the rain is diluting it to crimson. Except for the chest, he is completely still. Like a photograph.

_Rain has strange colors here…_

Somewhere, there is a light. White, and loud, and tinged red at the edges. Everything is tinged red at the edges, and Cloud feels himself slowly drifting. His ankle is sprained. He intends to hide it out, the war, even if he turns into a tree in this place. It's what he wants. He wants never to go back, wants so badly to go back. There are a lot of things he wants, wanted, and he thought he could bathe in starlight if he ran fast enough. Maybe he didn't run fast enough, but he doesn't think that's it. Dark, twisted, brown roots are springing from his ankle; they wrap themselves around his boots and burrow into the ground. No, it's that stars don't share their light, not really. They show them to you; his fingernails turn green, then red, then dies. Withers. His arms are branches. They show them _, how bright_ , entice you with their shimmering white lights. Somewhere there is a light – a loud one. No, but you can't reach it. They don't tell you, but they watch gladly as you run and fall.

_Maybe you didn't run fast enough._

He feels deep wrinkles across his chest, where a woodpecker might choose to nest. Someone is speaking to him, the man, and he hasn't noticed that Cloud has become a tree because he has his eyes closed; breathing shallow, painful. Raindrops slip into his open lips, but for Cloud they only soak into his fallen leaves.

"Only, I wanna say goodbye, properly," the man is saying. "Since you might be the last person I see." It takes Cloud a moment to understand what his words mean; his own words are becoming the swish of leaves in summer, hollow dance of boughs in winter. "I'm Zack. What's your name?"

 _Strife. It's Cloud Strife,_ he answers, but his voice doesn't come out.

The white light becomes a voice. The wind shakes him. The rain spits once more over his pale leaves, and Cloud wakes up.

-

For a moment he doesn't know where he is, whether he is still a tree. Gradually, though, the white light reveals itself to be the airy announcement of a train leaving Midgar in ten minutes, and not a light at all. Cloud sits up slowly. His neck hurts, and the cap – which had slid halfway off his face – falls to his laps. Cloud finds that he has slept through the night, and has missed the train. No matter, though, because he cannot remember where he was going to go and he's lost the ticket anyway.

Cloud shifts and stretches in his seat. He notices that the homeless woman from last night is gone, but there is someone else sitting a few seats next to him. She is pretending to read a magazine but Cloud knows she really isn't. The pages turn too randomly, and she is trying not to look at Cloud but altogether it's not really a good act. Cloud should know; he's been doing it all his life, perfecting it to a point of self-deception. On an impulse, he calls out.

"Hi."

The girl starts, and finally meets his eyes. She has golden brown eyes with a green tint, that makes them look like a puddle reflecting trees.

"Hi," she answers, a little hesitantly.

"It's just, you were watching me." Cloud says. The girl cobbles together a defensive face.

"I wasn't!" She says. When Cloud just shrugs, she breaks her own castle with a grin. Really not a good act, he thinks. There is something dangerously enticing about that; her honesty, is which he lacks. "Oh, all right, I was. How did you know?"

"It was the magazine." Cloud indicates it with his hand. "It's a car magazine."

"So? Maybe I'm interested in cars," she defends valiantly.

"No, you're not." Cloud says. He feels strange, maybe a little amused. The neon light is flickering, time and place and time again. The next train to Serlain is leaving in thirty minutes. Cloud opens his mouth again to distract himself from thoughts of Zack.

"Travelling?"

"No, not really. Wouldn't know where to go." The girl says easily. Her eyes twinkle as she turns her entire body towards him, regards him with such an open expression that it makes Cloud flinch. "How about you? You're back from the war, right?"

"Yeah," Cloud says, cautiously. From what he can gather, so far, everyone in the city is busy trying to ignore the war. It's probably because they are losing, Cloud thinks. It is different up in the North; people are sure of victory. Nobody remembers how it started, but at least they know how it would end.

"I admire you," she says, and Cloud wonders what it means. "You are all so brave."

"Not all of us," Cloud mutters, because he doesn't know what to say. He feels awkward in the admiration in her eyes.

"All of you," she insists. Cloud shrugs.

"So what are you doing here, then?" He asks, to distract her. Her eyes jump away, then back at him again with something like a mischievous glory of childhood summer days.

"I just like the station, you know," she says. "I like the bustling, and the rustling, and the people. I like watching people."

"What's there to like?" Cloud wonders.

"See that woman over there?" She points at the woman sitting across from them at the other end of the wall, a brown luggage by her feet and sunglasses on her nose. She is reading a fashion magazine with her legs crossed, tar-black high heels gleaming sleekly. She looks fake to Cloud; pretentious, proper, lonely. Someone who would willingly stuff herself into a picture in a magazine if she could. Cloud looks away.

"What about her?"

"I like to give them names. And dreams. She might be – "

"Cherrie," Cloud says, thinking of Perry Bill's younger sister. Come to think of it, she's probably dead. So is her brother.

"Don't be stupid." She rolls her eyes theatrically, though her lips are smiling. Cloud likes her smile; it's clean and reminds him of flowers that bloom in winters. "Maybe Cheryl, though. That'll do."

"What's the – "

"Shh. And her dream?" She quizzes, eyebrows raising slightly. Cloud regards the woman again.

"Marry rich," he says. The girl bursts out laughing, in an incredulous way. It goes on for a while longer, and Cloud finds that he is amused. Not of his own remark, but of the sincerity in her that finds it funny.

"Okay, fine, I get your point." She says, when she's stopped laughing. The laughter lingers in the air, though, like honey that drips between breads. "I feel like that too, sometimes. But I try not to."

"Feel like what?" Cloud asks.

"I don't know, gray. When colors burn they become gray, don't they?"

"Do they?" Cloud feels confused. She only smiles, not sunflower, like before, but gypsophila. Those small flowers that scatter slowly, suddenly, staining the air with their ambiguous shapes.

"You're not going anywhere, are you?" She asks after a minute, when Cloud is fully lost in thousands of gypsophila.

"No," he says. "I guess not."

"Neither am I. We're probably the only two in the station who's not actually going anywhere," she laughs. Cloud likes the sound of that; the only two, like it's some kind of a personal adventure, even though they're not going anywhere.

"I…" Cloud starts to say, but she is getting up and hasn't heard him speak. She drops the magazine back into the rack.

"I should go. I got a letter to write, actually." She says. She smiles at Cloud.

"Sure," Cloud says, not knowing what he's agreeing to.

"Good day," she says. "Hope you find some colors."

Cloud nods. She walks away with another smile. Cloud notices that she wears a beige hat with a dark brown ribbon, and a olive green dress with red and pink flower patterns. He watches her walk away until she's disappeared through the double door entrance of the train station. He looks around, and finds that she is right; when colors burn, they leave gray.

Zack had yellow buttons, he recalls, and blue eyes. But he is gone, and Cloud will never see him again. He will never see that girl again, either, but it doesn't hurt him as it used to; it's been a few years, and people leave.

People can get used to anything. It is the only thing he's learned that's of any use.

Cloud gets up to leave the station, but stops. He turns and walks to the woman in sunglasses; he is looking for something, a proof, maybe, and he stops in front of her.

"Excuse me, ma'am," he says.

"Yes?" The woman looks up, startled.

"Sorry, but can I ask your name?" The unbuttoned uniform, his messy hair, soiled boots help; the woman has the same fear and denial in her eyes, as he's seen in other people around here.

"It's Raina," she says nervously. "Raina Cardon. Why do you ask?"

"Must have mistaken you for someone else," Cloud says and walks away. He feels like he's proven a point. Exactly what that is, he doesn't know, but he walks out in contentment.

-

The outside, the sun is murdering ants. He steps on one, inadvertently, maybe intentionally, to put it out of its misery. He doesn't much like summer. It burns, and as she had pointed out, when it burns it only leaves gray. People walk past in hurried steps. They have got somewhere to be. A couple of girls are laughing; the taller one has pretty cheekbones and a boyfriend, Cloud decides, and the plumper one doesn't. She admires and despises her friend, who strides past him in confident steps; spares him a curious glance. Cloud waits with them for the light, and they laugh louder to impress him. Cloud wouldn't have noticed the color of their hairs, if the sun had not suddenly split the clouds and shot forward, bathing their already golden hairs with glitters. Cloud wonders if it will do the same to his own yellow hair, and moves back into the shadow. The light changes. He crosses the street, out into the city, with no direction.

The sun writhes across the sidewalk. Across the road, where cars rush over it, and spews golden blood. It is rather a fantastic sight, and Cloud stares at it, mesmerized.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 03

-

"I think you need a drink," Biggs insists. Tifa thinks she is too tired for it, but she can't stand going back to the house alone. The shop is alien to her now; new post, a whole new set of rules to learn. Sal has given her Jessie's old post at women's jewelry. Tifa can't tell if she is trying to be nice or cruel.

"Fine. Okay." Tifa says.

"Are you okay? You know, about Jessie." Biggs cares, obviously, but Tifa doesn't want to doubt him. Tifa hastens to change the subject.

"Yeah, I'm fine. She's – fine. She told me she's going home."

"Really?" Biggs looks doubtful. "Where's that? I mean, I thought she was born here."

"A small village," Tifa says. "Gongaga." She doesn't want to have to invent more lies, so she pushes open the door to the bar quickly. It's the second time she's been here, but already the atmosphere is familiar; the drawling smell of alcohol, the noise of so many lives. It's the cheapest of the many bars around here. They take a table near the bar seats. There are one or two people sitting at the bar, with their backs turned. Tifa feels tired. She tries not to sink into the cushion seat. Biggs orders them both a cocktail. "Special cheer-up drink," he explains. "I'm buying."

"Don't be stupid," Tifa says.

"Why is that stupid?" Biggs is genuinely wondering. Tifa doesn't think she can explain, but she tries anyway.

"Because – because then it'd be like, you feel sorry for me," Tifa says. "And we don't even know… I mean, Jessie was on that train. I know she was."

"Of course she was," Biggs says quietly. "Where else?"

They don't say anything for a while. Tifa feels nothing has become any clearer, but doesn't think she can take any more. _He's not here,_ was Jessie's last word, and she wants desperately for something to prove her wrong. She's never believed in God, but the sudden absence is hollow. She doesn't think she can stand having doubt replaced by unbelief; too big a change, like searching through every compartment and not finding a single familiar face.

-

"Corporal, he is," the bartender is a balding, middle-aged man who fidgets with a glass and mixes terrible drinks. The proportion is more than a little off; there is too much raw alcohol that it burns its way through his throat, but Cloud likes it better that way. He likes the old man. He has a son who's in the war. "My son, Corporal Pamber. You heard of him?"

"No, I haven't." Cloud says amiably, takes another drink that scars his throat. "But it's a big war."

"An' you?" The man finally puts down his glass. An order comes in and he fills a beer mug distractedly. It pours over the edge.

"Oh, I've been around." Cloud is feeling cheerful. His head is spinning pleasantly, like a colorful dance, and the acid is collaborating with the alcohol to claw their way out of his stomach; make their escape. He hasn't eaten anything today. "Just, around. It's been a few years."

"Yeah? So what happened?" He is not without sympathy, but not much of it, so Cloud relaxes.

"Nothing happened. My time was up."

"Huh, so you – you got a place to stay?" He is a nervous man, Cloud notes, as the man picks up the same glass from before to wipe it again. Perhaps he sees Corporal Pamber in Cloud. Perhaps he has not heard from his son in a few weeks, which is likely because the last piece he saw of Tirrel Pamber was his dog tag lying abandoned in the mud, about when spring was ending.

"No, I don't."

"You can stay in Tirrel's room, if you like – it's just upstairs, I mean. Until he's back." The man says in a sudden desire for kindness. Cloud ceases to exist, in his mind, and Tirrel Pamber becomes a staggering soldier somewhere being offered a room to stay by a kind woman. Cloud observes this, and it occurs to him that he should tell the man about Tirrel's abandoned dog tag; but he decides not to. It's not like he's actually seen the body, or the eaten-out eyes.

"Yeah, that's kind of you." Cloud says. There is a right amount of gratitude and surprise in his voice, he feels, and he is satisfied. "Thank you. Until he's back, of course."

"Okay," the man nods. He is also satisfied. Then, feeling friendly, he asks, "Your accent, is it Northern?"

"Yeah," Cloud catches himself from adding an extra syllable. A longer, slower speech that he's picked up from Zack. "But not that North."

"Oh, so, Serlain?"

"No. Northeast of that."

"Well, but that's – " the man frowns. "Isn't it where, at the beginning of the war… "

Cloud nods before the man can finish the sentence, and that's when someone grabs his arm.

He almost shakes it off. It's the mud, it's the rain – death by his ear, in three  _taps_ – and the bar suddenly flashes into something different, flashing fires and fallen limbs, going numb because there is too much to do. Too many moves to perform, too complicated, and he's never liked dancing. Cloud turns around all ready for another try at the masquerade, but it's only a girl. A surprised-looking girl, and for a moment Cloud can't figure out why.

Then it becomes a face he knows.

Her hair has darkened, almost to black, and her almond-brown eyes have narrowed. There is a line to her jaws that wasn't there before. She hasn't changed that much. She still wears that expression, but Cloud supposes that she would – he waits, patiently, for the image to morph itself into something different. A red-haired girl, a blonde, a dog. It doesn't. Cloud stares. The ceiling lights aren't disconnected arms anymore but they are still too sharp.

"Is it someone you know, Tifa?" Someone's voice can be heard distantly. It confuses Cloud for a minute. The girl is still staring at him with wide eyes and a tight grip, it's starting to hurt, and it's starting to make sense. Cloud relaxes. She is not an apparition. It is just a coincidence. Chance, luck, fate, whatever they call it these days.

"Hi, Tifa," he says. "Didn't think I'd run into you like this."

-

Tifa tries hard not to think it as a proof. It hardly is.  _Chance, luck, fate,_ Cloud had said. He'd said it with a straight face. Tifa can't tell if he's serious.

They sit, the three of them, at the table Biggs's paid for, and Cloud doesn't comment on the sapphire-blue cocktail they're drinking. His own drink is something that smells like a chemistry lab. Mr. Pamber, at the bar, smiles at Cloud as he pours him another half-concocted drink.

"Friends?" Mr. Pamber asks. "I know Biggs here, and his lady friend…"

"We're not exactly," Biggs says. "Uh, you know." He's looking at Cloud, but Cloud seems immersed in studying the molecules in his drink. Mr. Pamber shrugs and leaves them. There is an awkward silence, and Tifa wishes she had drunk something stronger.

"So, uh, should I – should I leave you guys alone? I mean, you probably wanna," Biggs coughs. He sounds uncomfortable. Cloud looks up at that, finally. He puts his glass down on the table.

"Why, you got somewhere to be?" He asks, and Biggs falls quiet. Cloud is – unintentionally – intimidating in his army uniform, and Tifa is suddenly choked. She feels desperate. Suddenly he is here, and suddenly she can't remember a single conversation they had. She remembers vaguely that it used to be easy, but now –

"Five years," Cloud says. "Long time."

"Yeah," Tifa agrees feebly, feeling like someone is squeezing her heart for juice. She notices that Cloud doesn't ask how she's been; she doesn't ask, either, because – the uniform, Tifa swallows. She doesn't mention the war. The village that burned. It leaves little else to talk about.

Biggs seems to have realized her struggle. He speaks in a light voice, like Cloud is a friend of a friend he's just met at a college party.

"So, you just got back?" He asks. "Where are you staying?"

"I'm gonna stay with Tirrel's father, apparently." Cloud answers, and Tifa wonders who that is. Perhaps a fellow soldier, perhaps no one at all. She had never been able to tell when Cloud is lying.

"You're going to – so where's your stuff?"

"I lost it," Cloud says.

"You lost – "

"You mean, it got stolen," Tifa says. It isn't a conscious thing, but something that slips out of her mouth like slipping on a pair of boots she's worn for so long. "You always say  _lost._ It's never just,  _lost."_

"I know," Cloud looks a little surprised.

Then, suddenly, he smiles. There is no warning about it, but the effect is dizzying. It's the crooked orange light of the bar, falling on his face like a sunset, and his face is set in harder lines but it's still Cloud – his eyes are just as blue as she remembers. His hair still glows in the dim light like it's bathing in starlight; but it's never been his hair, or even his eyes, no matter what she tells him. It's just that Cloud is – and has always been – like a bright, beautiful corner of the world that is safely hidden. A fairytale castle, surrounded by waterfall, and swirling fogs, rain and pieces of sky in the water. Tifa feels like she has been waiting for this moment all this time. That she has seen this before, this smile, and wound herself back in time to wait for it again, a hundred times.

Because suddenly it makes sense; she had been waiting.

"I've missed this," Cloud says. He doesn't tell her what he means by  _this_. Tifa drops her head. Suddenly she can't meet his eyes. Suddenly the five years jump up at her almost tangible, disappearing into obscurity at the same time. She can't figure out the noise in her head.

"Ed quit last week," Biggs says suddenly. Tifa looks at him, feeling flushed, and Biggs is shaking his head slowly with a smile. She wonders what he's thinking. "If you're interested."

"Who's Ed?" Tifa asks. Biggs raises his eyebrows incredulously.

"The security guard, Tifa. You haven't noticed he doesn't show anymore?"

"Oh," Tifa feels embarrassed. She is anxious that Cloud might think her uninterested, apathetic, which she is, but –

"The security guard. Where?" Cloud asks. He sips his drink, doesn't notice Tifa's embarrassment.

" _Midgar's._ It's a department store a few blocks from here. We – Tifa and me – work there."

"So Ed quit," Cloud says. He sounds amused. "I'll be Ed, then."

Tifa looks up at that. The question tingles her throat, she almost spills it out, but holds it back at the last minute. She wants to ask,  _what's happened to your dreams_ , but it's not her place to ask.

"You'll get the job," Biggs says confidently. "You've served. It's all the qualification they need."

"Okay," is all Cloud says. Tifa wants to ask a lot of questions, and doesn't want to know the answer to any of them. With all the things they are avoiding, though, it leaves little else to talk about.

"So I'll see you… tomorrow at work?" Tifa asks instead, when their talks have died and the bar's settled into a comfortable slur around them. Tifa hasn't drunk anything much but she feels intoxicated. Cloud looks at her, and a lot of things have changed but his eyes have the same glint as they did, before; or maybe she is imagining it, and she has the same imagination as before.

"Yes," Cloud says, and that's all Tifa needs to know right now. She nods contentedly.

"It's nice to see you again," she tells him, in a sudden bout of honesty and sentiment. He's going to be at work, tomorrow.

"Yeah, it is. Maybe it's fate." Cloud jokes; or he's serious, and Tifa can't tell.

-

It starts to rain on the way home. It's just a drizzle, a soft thing soaking almost without meaning to. It turns out Tirrel is Mr. Pamber's son, who is serving in the war; Tifa and Biggs leave Cloud helping Mr. Pamber and clearing the glasses. He looks awkward doing odd jobs with a serious face with his soldier's uniform.

"Damn, it's raining," Biggs observes. His voice has a hollow quality that sinks into the rain.

"It's just a drizzle," Tifa says distractedly.

"So you and Cloud – childhood friends?"

"Yeah, I guess," Tifa answers, thinking that it's not as simple as that.

"Have you noticed – " Biggs pauses, and studies her face. She keeps it carefully composed, not sure of what might be under it. "Have you noticed that he's a little, I don't know – "

"He's been in a war, Biggs," she says, more stiffly than she intends. "He needs time to recover."

"Right. Yes. Of course. It's just, like he never really looks at you. Like you're a ghost, or something."

"So what, maybe I am." Tifa tries to say it lightly. Biggs shrugs and doesn't say anything more.

They say their goodbye, and she unlocks her door thinking about tomorrow. It is foolish to hope, she knows, but she can't help but shudder at the thought of seeing Cloud at work. At  _her_ work, in her life, after – after so many years, and she expects to wake up anytime soon and find that it was a dream again, an image floated out from behind that big, white wall.

_Hi, Tifa. Didn't think I'd run into you like this._

She doesn't want to hope; she desperately doesn't. Except she can't help but think that everything was going to be better now. So many more colors, now, because now Cloud is here.  _It's not going to be like before,_ she tells herself firmly.  _Five years have changed both of us._

She isn't sure if she believes herself. After all – she thinks, dropping down on her bed and not bothering to get changed despite the smell of rain on her clothes – it is still Cloud, and he is still –

Tifa falls asleep trying on different adjectives for him to wear. She discards  _beautiful_ early on because it is too simple and a little sappy; but she comes back to it eventually, ravishing in its simplicity and promise.

-

Tifa barely remembers Ed's face, now, although she must have passed him so many times on her way to work. It is where Cloud is stationed, at the first-floor lobby in his brand new security guard uniform. His collar is stiff and blue; his face is politely disinterested, giving the impression that he is seeing everything and everyone but doesn't care about it much. Tifa feels nervous the first time she passes him, but he nods at her like he has nodded at her for the last five years, every day, at the same place.

Suddenly, it seems, the summer dazzles through as if it has made up its mind at last, and just as quickly, Tifa gets used to seeing Cloud there; in her life. Her  _life_ doesn't seem quite that bleak anymore. Tifa wonders at it, cherishes and cradles it and she is afraid it might end. There is something wrong with Cloud, as Biggs says, but she is content to overlook it for now. He doesn't mention the war, she doesn't mention the village, and they talk about roses while they eat lunch together. Biggs joins them sometimes, and they have even developed a sort of camaraderie; a mutual acceptance, as far as Tifa can see. Cloud endures Biggs's sputter of jokes and big dream (she had thought he would leave, when Biggs had echoed "I'm gonna be great one day _,"_ but Cloud had merely looked amused; Tifa wonders if he remembers, after all), and Biggs endures Cloud's new routine: off-key silence spiced with odd remarks here and there, and an apparent inability to care much about anything. It troubles Tifa, but he is a war veteran, after all, and she hopes time will make him better. Mostly he is pleasant enough, though; only sometimes, some broken pieces of the last five years can be glimpsed through his pale mask.

"Rose madder lake," Cloud says. Biggs gasps at him.

"What the hell is that?"

"It's a color. This color." They are studying a painting together, the three of them crowded in front of an amateur painting sale in the subway station. They are looking for a decent but inexpensive painting to hang on Cloud's bare walls, in a new room he rented with the money the government owes him. Cloud doesn't seem to mind the bareness but Biggs thinks it's unnatural and Tifa finds it a little frightening; her own place is so full of odds and ends of everything she fancies and collects.

"How do you know that?" Tifa wonders.

"I have a sharp eye," Cloud says as an explanation. His face is mild and distant, so they can't tell if he is trying to be funny, but both Tifa and Biggs had gotten used to that by now.

"Well, it just looks like red to me, but doesn't matter," Biggs decides. "I like this one. How about you?"

"Sure," Cloud says after a slight pause. "I don't mind."

"But isn't the color pretty?" Tifa presses, tracing the brittle petals of the flower, the color Cloud had identified as Rose madder lake.

"Yeah, it is," Cloud says with vague cheerfulness, like he's laughing inside at some private joke only he knows. "Musk rose."

-

In the middle of summer, the night comes with an explosion. Biggs has gone home early, sick, and Tifa and Cloud are walking back home side by side when it happens. The shortcut to Tifa's apartment takes only ten minutes, but going round it takes twenty and Cloud's home is somewhere between seventeen and eighteen minutes. Tifa pretends not to have known about that shortcut, when Cloud points it out. She continues to walk a long way, insisting that she likes the quiet walk better than the commotion of the main road. It is almost true. Cloud says nothing.

The night happens in the same way as their reunion did, suddenly and with life-shattering blazes. The sun drops majestically. It gets bigger until it disappears, grows impossibly brighter and engulfs the buildings and people with a burnt-out brown and red. There is an old tree on top of the hill they are walking up on.

It must have stood so strikingly once upon a time, Tifa thinks, on top of a hill overlooking a small village. The townspeople must have worshipped it. The dying sun hangs between the branches and seems to be struggling to get free. The clouds are all drenched with the same scarlet light, and it's like they have caught fire. Tifa looks beside her and is startled to find Cloud there; walking actually beside herself, so that she doesn't have to imagine the liquid sunset draping over his face.

"It feels like it's always sunset, with you." Tifa muses. She feels poetic, at the edge of day and night.

"Why is that?" Cloud asks. He is staring at the sun, or the tree, Tifa can't tell. They walk slowly.

"I don't know. It just is. I guess I remember it the most vividly. The sunsets, I mean."

"It's beautiful," Cloud murmurs. Tifa feels like he hasn't really heard what she said, but she follow his gaze anyway.

"What is? The sunset?"

"No, the tree," he says. "So majestic, don't you think?"

"That's what I've been thinking," Tifa is relieved; of what, she couldn't tell. "I was thinking the villagers must have worshipped it…"

"What villagers?"

"You know, long time ago. When this wasn't a city and wasn't called Midgar."

"I was thinking," Cloud narrows his eyes, stretches out his hand as if to touch it. Although they are still a little further away from the tree, Tifa thinks she can see his hand touching the great brown trunk and melting into it. "Before that, before all that. When there were no people at all."

"This tree can't be that old," Tifa wonders. "Trees don't live that long. Maybe rocks."

"It feels like it might have." Cloud says, and with such finality that Tifa can't argue. She looks at the tree again as they pass and thinks he might be right.

-

Tifa is still tentative about it; she braces herself every day, waiting for something to go wrong, but nothing happens for a few weeks and she slowly relaxes. She feels like she could go anywhere. If Cloud had asked, she could have escaped; she could have gone to a southern island where the water reflects the sun in shimmering patterns like the shell of a tortoise, and has a turquoise color. She could have, but Cloud doesn't ask and she is content here anyway; she is a good salesperson, she can make people buy anything with a right smile, and she walks home with Cloud admiring the great big tree catching the sun in its arms. Cloud doesn't smile often, doesn't laugh at all; sometimes the days of their childhood seems only a one-sided dream, but it doesn't matter. Tifa feels certain that he will get better with time, that their days will eventually come to be something more than this department store, and for the first time in a while, she truly grasps that they are still young. Twenty and twenty one years old – it had been too early to be definite about their failures, and Tifa doesn't know why she hadn't seen that before. Biggs talks about a big dream and Tifa finds herself slowly hoping, too. She hopes that she, too, will make something out of herself one day; she hopes, above all, that these days with Cloud will last.

-

He is seventeen, wide-eyed, hopeful, when the war happens. It doesn't come with a fuss, being so unexpected. People assume it will end soon. He doesn't, hopes it doesn't, and he can't recall – now – exactly what day it was but he can clearly recall the small office, the smell of factory soaps and laser printers. He lies about his age; he passes all the examinations. He wonders now whether he could have chosen something different, like baking. Or even dancing, although he hates dancing, because he's not half bad at it. He has a natural flow in his body, a natural aptitude for translating what he sees into his arms and legs. It's just that every kind of dance he knows has to happen with music. He does not like the dependency of that, but it is only after Zack that he considers doing something else with his life. Of course, it is too late, then, and even after they are rescued from atop the hill on their enemy's land, the war keeps him busy. He writes poems in his head, then tries to forget them. He lives in the present but breathes the past, is lost in his fancy; it's only the future that is missing, but he doesn't miss it much. After all, he has never met it.

"Hey, Cloud," Biggs says pleasantly as he drops beside Cloud. He hasn't realized it is lunchtime, but he's here, so he must have remembered.

"Tifa's busy helping the manager with something," Biggs supplies even though Cloud doesn't ask. "I dunno what, but she's either gonna be late or not coming."

"Okay." Cloud says. Their lunch is nothing special, or so Cloud assumes; he doesn't really taste, anymore, ever since the incident with the peanut butter last week. He tries not to.

Zack used to say that he despised peanuts, but he liked peanut butter. Cloud used to think, sometimes, that the caked mud on their boots looked like crushed peanuts. Especially after the rain, when the soil sloshed and turned lighter brown.

"So, what did you do in the weekend?" Biggs asks cheerfully. Cloud invents some lies that he soon forgets; I played the piano and danced to it, he might have said, and Biggs must have thought it strange.  _How can you do them both at the same time?_  Except, if ever he were to dance, he would do it without music; it should learn to live alone, he thinks, rather than wait for something else to complete it.

Save for that sprained ankle, which had healed quickly, he hadn't been injured in a fight at all; when he came back briefly, his mother was dead. With confused generosity he had forgiven her, sensing that it was not entirely her fault.

"Well, I was stuck with my aunt. Remember I told you about her… I can't bear her, she always talks about me like I'm her prize." Biggs is saying.

"She's proud of you."

In fact, it hadn't been her fault at all. Cloud knows it, grudgingly accepts it most of the time, but then he is left with no one to blame. Blaming himself is out of the question.

Although, as Zack said, he might have considered doing something different with his life. He is good at math when he has to be; he would have made a decent accountant. It was the glory that had lured him. The starlight.

"Yeah, I suppose. How's it going with you, Cloud? What's new?"

"I guess … "

Cloud considers what he should say. A bomb goes off, never near him, but never far away. It is a strange sort of luck he has, being saved again and again only to tempt death again – like an exotic dance routine. He supposes everyone feels that way, though. After all, everyone who dies has survived until that point.

He hadn't been injured save for that sprained ankle, but that's not counting the dark chamber. He doesn't remember crawling out of there, and they must have thought him dead. It really is a strange sort of luck. It is not luck at all, maybe, but a punishment for his arrogance.

"Yes?" Biggs asks, and Cloud realizes that he had been about to answer Biggs's question. He can't remember what it was.

"I guess it was my arrogance," he reflects, "I shouldn't have despised her like I did."

There is a pause. It had been a wrong thing to say, but the right timing. Cloud considers what he's said, nods to himself. No, he should not have despised her. It had not been her fault, that she had been born so beautiful only to die so ugly.

And it had not been his fault, that he had not told him the truth. Truth was something dark and violent for them all. Him, most of all, who hadn't been born in Gongaga but neither had Cloud been born in Nibelheim.

"Who – despised who?" Biggs has recovered quickly; Cloud gives him credit for that, but Tifa is quicker. She has always been quick. Cloud smiles a little.

"Nothing, Biggs, just messin' with you."

"Oh," Biggs laughs. It's a relieved laughter. "I thought you were… never mind, then. Are you coming to the beach this weekend?"

"You must have told me before," Cloud says. Biggs sputters another laughter, an enduring and affectionate one. He is used to Cloud being forgetful.

In fact, he is not forgetful at all, because he remembers everything. Except for the day he's enlisted for the war, of course. It had been a summer day just like this one.

"Yeah, we did. So, are you coming?"

"I must have told you I would."

"Yes, you did. I was just reminding you."

"Good job," Cloud says. "Remind me again on the day."

"No problem, man," Biggs is really quite natural at his laughs, Cloud thinks, the same way he himself is quite a natural at inventing stories and believing in them.

 _You really should have been something else_ , Zack had said.  _Something great._

That had been his intention, Cloud remembers, but then he hadn't realized that stars were just rocks in space.

_How about you, wouldn't you like to have gone into, say, acting?_

_Yes. I think I'd have been good at it, actually._

-

It is not a drizzle, this time, but something that pours down between the torn clouds, pouring out from the cracks like blood. It's his day off, but he has nothing much going on outside his head and when he sees the rain almost engulfing the night white, he calls Tifa. She isn't off, yet, but she will be soon, and she doesn't have an umbrella.

" _It's okay, is it raining a lot?"_ Tifa says, and Cloud says he will meet her with an umbrella. He isn't doing much, anyway, just sitting around at the bar.

" _How did you know I didn't take an umbrella?"_ Tifa sounds amused, or astonished, or both.

"It looked so clear in the morning," Cloud says. "I was just guessing."

" _Well, thank you."_

Cloud steps out the door with two umbrellas. One is black, and the other one is curiously white; he had picked it up at the station, two days ago, but it'd looked gray and dull under the lights of the station. He locks the door behind him. There are a couple of umbrellas spread open and drying in the hallway of the apartment. One is bright orange, and the other one is olive green with flower patterns on it.

Cloud looks at it for a moment, trying to remember. It's hard to keep track of the time, and harder to separate between two realities. He doesn't try to decide one as real and the other false; it is all the same to him. He recognizes the wooden boards under his feet and the sound of raindrops hitting the dusty gray window as real – physical, tangible – but it doesn't mean that the other one is false. Not necessarily. The red soil, the ocean in the wind, red fodder lake the color of the lipstick they found lying on the ground. It had been a new one, maybe a birthday present. He'd picked it up, and Tirrel Pamber had joked,  _the color suits you, corporal,_ and that had been two days before he had found his dog tag abandoned in the mud.

-

He hears a laughter, and for a moment thinks that it must be from the other reality, the one with the old black journal. It sounds strangely wet, though. He turns a corner and sees – the back of a out-of-business bakery, under the metal eaves that rain bangs loudly on – three people. They are all boys, maybe seventeen or eighteen, wearing dirty gray and blue sweatshirts. One of them had laughed, he realizes, and the sound is wet because it travels through the rainfall to get to him. Cloud is about to leave them, when an older boy takes a step forward, and starts barking at the youngest. It isn't hard to guess what he's saying. The other gangly boy is keeping watch around the dark alley, and he spots Cloud first.

"Hey, what's your problem," he calls loud enough to be heard over the rain, and the big, muscular one stops and turns around. Their eyes are narrowed, taking in Cloud's face and his long-sleeved jacket (even though it is stuffy and humid, they would have thought), and sizing him up. After a while the gangly boy scoffs. The first one returns it, considers Cloud with a condescending look before turning back around. The smallest boy is looking at him with a pale face.

Cloud had always been too pale, so they said, to have come from Nibelheim. He was not born there; he does not know where, because Mira had never understood a question right. Whenever he asked about his home or his father, she would tell him what a good boy he was.  _Let's play hide and seek, my Cloud. My boy._

"What are you saying to your friend?" Cloud asks, mildly and pleasantly as if he is asking for the time. The muscular one wheels and faces him more ferociously, and laughs that hollow laugh again (they used to laugh like that, to make a point).

"None of your business, pal – "

Zack used to tell him,  _don't hold back so much, Cloud,_ and Cloud had laughed at that.  _I don't hold back anything, Zack. That's my problem._

Now he wonders if he had been wrong. He had broken Perry Bill's nose, and Perry's mother hadn't bothered to get anything out of them; the two of them, the filthy flies, living on the outskirts of the town and tolerated just barely because it was a respectable town, and they wouldn't throw rocks at any windows.

The dark chamber had smelled horribly wrong. If it had just been blood, he could have dealt with that, but it had been all sorts of different things. Like sour milk, broken sewer, smeared mustard in the sun. He wonders if he doesn't smell it now. He doesn't remember putting the umbrella down but now the rain is falling on his knees and eyelashes in steady beats. He doesn't remember anything, much, but he doesn't forget.

He'd broken Perry's nose, all right, but he had broken Cloud's ribs, first, and Cloud knows that it is the only reason they did not ask for money.

They underestimated him; they always did. Cloud doesn't see why not. It's familiar, this, with his fists and legs. He is close with his body, and there are no bridges between what he sees in his head and what he can make happen. He would have made a fabulous dancer, or a poet,  _one, two, three._ He feels the rage leave his body. He hadn't thought to call it rage; but to be fair, it hadn't even looked like rage. So confused, so messy, the outlines never so clear and broken ribs from – where? The clearing by the river, where he had fallen with a broken rib and almost drowned? The dark, filthy chamber where he had been for days, maybe even years? It hadn't been years, he knows for a fact, and the broken bones hadn't been the problem at both times. He'd been injured, torn, burned. He'd been staked to a tree and impaled by a branch.

He stops, and looks at the two dark messes lying on the ground before him. He doesn't remember who started throwing punches, but hopes it was him. He had been trained to kill, but the boys are not dead. They are not even that badly hurt, and there isn't even a lot of blood. Or – not much that he can see. Cloud squats down and the muscle in his legs ache a little. He looks into their faces, their open, frightened faces, and wonders what he could say. He remembers the river, but it had partly been his fault that time (although blaming himself is out of the question), taunting and teasing, looking for a fight. He couldn't have bore it if it had come to him first; he'd had to find it, before it found him, because  _waiting_ was such a tiresome state and he would rather fight. Or that had been his intention, if he's remembering it right.

In the end he can't find a sentence that sounds moral enough and looks up to check if the pale boy is all right. All he sees is the back of his head, disappearing quickly into the maze of the alley. Cloud watches it absently and stands up. Then he realizes that there are two other people, half-illuminated in the rain dotted streetlight, watching.

"I just, he was there with the umbrella and," Tifa is finding it difficult to talk, Cloud observes, and he suddenly notices that he is completely soaked. The rain has pasted his shirt on his arms, which he keeps covered at all times. "And – we tried calling you, and – "

Biggs has an umbrella over her head. Cloud nods, satisfied.

"Good," he says. He is confused if the rain is in this reality or the next one. But Biggs has an umbrella over her head, so it must be his imagination again – or is it the other way around? He turns his head and finds that both of his umbrellas are lying on the ground. The black one is resilient; resilient, foul and strong. The white one is gray again, torn and broken. He looks from it, to them standing in the rain. "This one is ruined."

He picks up the black umbrella but doesn't bother putting it up; he's soaked, anyway.

 


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 04

-

Tifa is wiping the glass display and trying not to think about the blood on Cloud's hands. Some classical music is playing in the background; the store is quiet at this hour.

There is a light footstep coming this way, stopping in front of her jewelries. Tifa looks up.

"Hi," a girl says brightly, a little cautiously. Tifa is still thinking about the dark alley, though, rain slippery like fish, so there is a beat before she recognizes the girl.

"Hey, you're…" Tifa finds the name a second later. "Aerith, isn't it?"

"Yes. You're Jessie's friend," Aerith says pleasantly. She has her hair up in a ponytail, tiny ruby earrings dangling from her ears to match the color. "I've been away a few weeks."

"Has it only been few weeks?" Tifa wonders. She adds, before Aerith can ask, "Jessie went home. I got her job."

"Oh, I see." Aerith wanders to the aisle with the necklaces, and Tifa hopes she doesn't have to make small talk. She is tired, having worried herself weak. About Cloud, about them together, about memories. She has a headache, and she wishes Aerith would just leave. But Aerith turns around as she's thinking that and fixes her with a small smile, as if she's read her mind, and Tifa tries not to flinch as she returns with a professional smile. She's working, after all; she'd even had such pride in her abilities and performance once, though it feels like a distant memory now.

"Anything you want, in particular?" Tifa makes herself ask.

"Oh, no, I just like to look around," Aerith smiles. "How're you finding the new job? What was your old one?"

"I used to sell dresses to little girls," Tifa answers. Aerith looks unduly impressed.

"Really? I'd imagine that would be so much more fulfilling."

"Why?"

"Because – children are happy when they're happy, and sad when they're sad," Aerith says, and Tifa can't tell if she is being serious. It reminds her of Cloud; and for one sharp moment, she regrets everything that's happened to them. The moment passes, and Tifa is suddenly worn out. Regret is useless and painful, and it drains something out of her.

"Aren't we all?" Tifa asks.

"Are we?" Aerith considers this, putting down the bracelet she's been observing. "I don't know. I don't think I am – it's the only thing I want to change in the next life."

"The next life?" Aerith's conversation pattern also reminds her of Cloud. They must be following a certain kind of logic in their head, a train of thought that makes sense, but they are both not so good at explaining them to other people; but maybe they don't need to. Tifa doesn't ask Cloud to explain when he starts to talk about rain on a sunny day, but then maybe she is just scared.

"Supposing we had one," Aerith says cheerfully. "Don't you think it's fairer to have a next life?"

"I don't know," Tifa says. Something about Aerith makes her a little nervous, reluctantly honest. "Fairer for whom?"

"Good question. I'll have to think about that … So, what about you?"

"Me?"

"Yes. What would your next life be? A superstar… or an alligator?"

Despite herself, Tifa laughs a little. "Why an alligator?" She wonders, imagining herself living in a swamp, eyeing the frogs that balance on the rocks. She would be fearless, she would lure them into the mud, and she would be powerful; she could resist the gravity, the darkness that swallows. Tifa has made herself fascinated, and she wonders if Aerith has thought of all that too.

"It rhymes with superstar," is Aerith's answer. Tifa laughs again.

"No, it doesn't."

She tells Aerith that she doesn't know yet, and that she'll have to think about it.

"You would change just one thing, then?" Tifa asks.

"Yes. Just one." Aerith answers decidedly, as if she's thought about this long and came to an indisputable conclusion; Tifa thinks she really might have. She's also envious, subtly but almost maddeningly jealous, because it means that Aerith has such a good life. She cannot imagine how it feels to be content like that, only one thing away from perfection. The blood on Cloud's hands. They never did get the story straight; was it him, or them that had started the fight? Cloud didn't know, and Tifa believes him. Cloud forgets things now; comes to the wrong conclusions, doesn't hear, doesn't see what is right in front of him. It is like he lives in two different worlds.

Aerith leaves without buying anything, that day, and only after making Tifa promise to really think about it. Tifa promises; she will really think about it, because maybe it really is fairer that way – there are so many ways to mess up, and if there was a God and He couldn't find the time to watch over everyone, maybe He would want them to have second, third chances. Maybe she will get it right one day, Tifa thinks.

-

Both Tifa and Biggs are surprised. Cloud could have felt proud for remembering the date and time, even getting to the station thirty minutes earlier than they had planned. Except that he has done it by accident, but he figures he doesn't have to mention that.

"Hey, you remembered – I was just about to call," Biggs says, and he doesn't try to conceal his astonishment. Although he had reminded Cloud yesterday, and anyone should be able to remember such things for a day – surely – if they tried. Cloud hadn't, and he only sits on the train heading for the beach, by accident. He'd simply wandered into the station after a fitful night's sleep; but he only nods, and his voice even sounds humorous to his own ears.

"I'm not a fish, Biggs," he says. "I can remember stuff."

Tifa laughs at that. Cloud feels a headache that's been stalking at the edge of his vision creeping closer, getting ready to pounce. He realizes that he's forgotten to take his pills this morning, or even last night; holidays are inconvenient, he reflects gloomily. It is harder to distinguish between night and day, morning and evening, and he always forgets to eat and sleep and take his pills at the right times. Come to think of it, Cloud doesn't remember taking any pills after – after he said goodbye to Zack – but he must have, if he is standing here whole and alive. His doctor had been very strict on that point.

"It's going to be great," Tifa says to no one in particular. She is looking at the sky lazing past by the window; it is an exceptionally blue sky, with clouds in various states of dissolution. Some are sturdily white; some are almost nothing, transparent and feeble.

"It will be."

It's not Cloud who answers; he forgets to speak, busy watching for the wind to dissolve the vapors into blue and melt the white, as if it has never existed.

-

There aren't many people on the beach. It's magnificent at this early hour; the water glistens between emerald green and deep turquoise, the sun explodes white against the fine sand, and their shadows are sharp, black things thrown across the bright shore. There is a small old rowboat, broken, to the left and water swishes over it like it's an island.

"I thought it'd be packed," Biggs says, putting his backpack down on the sand. He has brought a parasol, Tifa sees with amusement, and a pair of flip-flops. Of the three of them, he is the only one who seems to belong on this beach. Biggs makes himself busy with putting up the parasol and spreading out towels for them to sit on, and Cloud wanders a little to the edge of the water. Tifa stares at his back; at his flapping white shirt, dark brown pants rolled up to his shins, uncertain steps that waver like he's drunk on the sea breeze. The air tastes like sapphire and salt, here.

"It's still early, I guess," Tifa says. "We're here early, too."

"I didn't expect Cloud to be there then," Biggs says with a grin. They sit down in the shade he's made, and after a while Cloud comes walking back. The sand tries to swallow his canvas shoes and there is ocean tangled in his hair.

"I like the sea," he comments as he lowers himself to the sand beside them, slowly and deliberately as if he's performing a complicated dance move. "But it's too salty."

"The sea?" Tifa laughs a little. "Of course it is."

"It's salt water," Biggs puts in wisely. Cloud shakes his head.

"Infects the wind, too."

"Interesting way to put it," Biggs chuckles. "So, guys, anyway. I have something to say. I figure now is as good a time as any."

"What is it?" Tifa asks. A breeze messes up her hair and Cloud is right – it's infected with salt, heavy and lazy.

"Well, the thing is – " There is hesitation in his voice, a little regret, that makes Tifa nervous. She waits quietly for him to finish. "Remember I told you that I was studying?"

"To be a lawyer, yeah." Tifa says. Biggs nods quickly, as if he's received her permission now.

"Yeah. And that this job was temporary. Well… I think I got enough money for the next term now."

"Really? That's great – Biggs, I'm so glad." Tifa smiles. It  _is_ great, and it's certainly not like the last time ("I'm gonna be famous. They won't know me there, they won't know my mom"), she tells herself. It's just that, everyone leaves her to be something great; but she hadn't cried then, and she isn't crying now. She gives him a hug – the heavy, salty wind between their bodies – and Biggs is beaming with the future, the promise of it all.

"Good luck, Biggs." She says, sincerely, after they've broken apart. Biggs grins wider and thanks her.

"I wish you get it," Cloud says after a pause. "Get the starlight." There is a glazed look in his eyes, and he's not looking at either of them even though his eyes are on Biggs. Biggs lets out a surprised laugh.

"That was poetic, Cloud."

"He's a poet," Tifa says, suddenly remembering. She pretends to tease, thinking that the sun is getting denser by the second. "Used to write poetry all the time, didn't you?"

"He did?" Biggs says, then glances at Tifa's face and realizes she is joking. He prepares to laugh, but Cloud speaks before he can laugh. Even his voice sounds distant, like it's hastily constructed from half-pieces in the air.

"Oh, right," Cloud says. "I did."

Tifa can't find anything else to say. She can never seem to ask the right questions at the right time, and even now she can't ask what was it that he wrote about.

-

They have sandwiches (infected with the sea, but still the bread is a pleasing shade of brown) on the beach, and Cloud doesn't remember much from their various conversations but it's surprisingly effortless. He almost forgets about the headache; it is only after they get off the train and starts walking home that he remembers. Biggs's apartment is in the opposite direction but he insists on walking them home.

The night makes him uneasy, and his headache returns with much stronger force, as if it's been gathering strength and circling its prey all day. Light is its enemy and darkness its ally, Cloud decides, and quickens his steps. Soon they are in front of Tifa's apartment. Tifa and Biggs exchange pleasant words and goodbyes again. Biggs assures her that he will stay another week, to get things in order, and that he will visit often.

"Good night, Cloud. I'll see you tomorrow," Tifa says to him. Cloud watches her turn her back. He prepares to say goodbye to Biggs. He is good at saying goodbye, it seems, much better than saying other things. The finality of it fascinates him in a morbid way.

"I'll walk you home, too," Biggs says before Cloud can speak, though, and Cloud doesn't argue. He thinks he can let Biggs indulge in this, a strange affection (or fascination, maybe, the same way he is fascinated with goodbyes) he has formed for Cloud.

There is a man inside his head, methodically slicing a part of his brain for consumption.

Cloud concentrates on his feet, but it's too dark, and the streetlamp isn't working. The next patch of light is too far away. The darkness makes him uneasy; it reminds him of the dark room. Memories and thoughts arise more clearly now, through the drumming noise in his head, and he begins to think that maybe the pills had been the problem – because now he can remember, he can clearly remember taking them. Not this morning, though.

"Cloud, actually – actually I wanted to speak to you," Biggs says a little hesitantly. Cloud makes a noise to make him think he is listening. In truth, he isn't. He keeps remembering, frantically, afraid that if he stops now he will never remember again. He cannot explain this fear.

_Do you know how we got through? Do you know who?_

Suddenly everything is so clear. He can remember every crack in his eyes, every still picture in his mind that suddenly starts to breathe. He even remembers the voice, the strange drawling accent that had made him afraid although he wouldn't have admitted it. He hadn't admitted anything, and he could have been proud of that if he didn't already know the truth. The truth was that he was nothing, not worth anything, and there had been better things for them. He hadn't even been injured in the war.

_This one is useless._

_He'd been delirious on the phone, maybe he meant some other…_

No, I don't know who, he'd answered, the only thing he'd said, and they told him. It wasn't important to them; it was nothing, like Cloud was nothing.

" – and, the thing is," Biggs is speaking. He had been speaking for some time now, presumably, and Cloud can't remember if he'd made any answers. "Don't get offended or anything, but I think… I think you need – help."

"Help?" Cloud echoes, dumbly, trying to concentrate.

"Yeah," Biggs sounds relieved that Cloud is finally paying attention. It makes him liberal. "You know, like seeing a doctor or something."

"But I did," Cloud says. "I have pills. It's okay."

"Well – I mean, I think it depends on what you mean, by  _okay."_

"I'm not gonna go to another doctor," Cloud decides. "I didn't take my pills today. I'll be okay if I don't forget. Or – if I don't remember – "

"I'm sure, but – I'm worried about you. I wish I could help."

Cloud abruptly stops. He looks at Biggs. His words stay in his air, poisoning, tantalizing. His headache attacks again, gladly gouging the wound that is not quite deep enough. Cloud realizes that he is angry, furious, and it's a little late for that; the fury comes like a lost soldier arriving after the war has ended, staring at the corpses of his comrades and enemies. He doesn't know what to do with it.

"You know," he says after a short pause, in which Biggs looks at him with wide eyes trying to figure out what he's done wrong. It isn't Biggs's fault, Cloud knows, but he has to blame somebody if he can't blame himself. "That's exactly what he said."

"Who?"

Cloud doesn't get angry in a loud way. It usually makes them madder to see him calm and collected. He's learned how to turn fire into ice. The flames become icy spikes, something that severs instead of smolders. He hasn't gotten angry in a long time, though, perhaps being too confused; but he had been, once, the one to go looking for a fight before it found him. Carefully calculated contempt and silence. Cloud feels dizzy.

"It doesn't matter," he says with some difficulty. He tries to walk away; after all, he's not that angry child anymore (What if he is, though? What if he hasn't changed – and maybe that is the real problem), and Biggs is only trying to be kind.

"Wait, what – Cloud, please." Biggs grabs his arm. His touch makes him recoil, on the arm that he keeps carefully hidden at all times. He shakes him off, and Biggs takes a step back.

"Why would you care?" Cloud says, quietly, politely, cradling the frost between his fingers.

"Because I'm your friend!" Biggs says, desperately, and Cloud sees this misstep as clearly as a warrior sees his opponent drop his shield. For a second he is vulnerable, and Cloud strikes forward without really thinking about it.

"I'm not your friend," he says, and leaves Biggs standing there. Every step he takes reverberates inside his skull like broken pieces of a sword he's smashed.

 _I'm worried about you. I wish I could help._ He'd smiled and told him,  _you did,_ and it hadn't occurred to him that it was an irony. Irony didn't appeal to him anymore; it was too complicated. Instead he'd wondered if fury had left him forever, and vaguely bemoaned its death but not really; he'd be glad to get rid of it.

It turns out that it wasn't dead, though, and Cloud reluctantly finds irony in  _that_ – that it should be this late, more than a step behind, wrong place at the wrong time.

-

"Who?" Tifa hears Biggs speak, and there is frustration in his voice, so she hides herself in the darkness. Darkness is a good cover; they can't see her where she stands behind a closed hairdresser's, but there is a spot of orange light falling on them (like a scene from a play, as if they are putting on a show for her specially) and she can see both Biggs and Cloud. They are a few steps apart. Tifa regrets coming back; she has taken Biggs's bag by accident but she could have given it back tomorrow. She feels like she is intruding on something, the way that Biggs is about to spring and Cloud regards him standing completely still. After a beat, Cloud turns away.

"It doesn't matter."

"Wait, what – Cloud, please." Biggs's hand lands on Cloud's arm, and Tifa knows it was the wrong thing to do; she has noticed how Cloud never wears short sleeves, even in stifling heat, and she should have asked about it but didn't. Biggs apparently hasn't noticed. He looks surprised when Cloud shakes him off, violently, and takes a faltering step back. Cloud looks at him evenly, calmly, and his eyes are foreign, cold. She watches, unable to look away, holds her breath, like waiting for the bloody death in a play that she already knows the ending of.

Cloud says something too quietly for Tifa to catch. He is holding his arm like it's a weapon, and still he looks measured and unhurried. It is Biggs who gets frustrated, stepping forward seemingly without realizing. "Because I'm your friend!"

Afterwards, she will try so hard to give it a different name; but at that moment there is nothing else to describe the pale ghost of a smile on his lip; nothing else, but perhaps  _contempt_. He is cruel; the wind is stuffy and tangled even at night, and the moon is nowhere to be seen but she doesn't think she could have stopped herself from crying if there was moonlight instead of streetlight.

"I'm not your friend," Cloud says and turns away. Biggs is rooted to the spot, his back to her, and Cloud's silhouette soon disappears into the murmuring darkness. He is cruel. Tifa is lost, suddenly.

Biggs finally starts walking in the opposite direction, and Tifa doesn't go after him. She holds her breath. The street is quiet, just a low sound of night wind and a stray cat somewhere among the alleys. She starts walking back home. She feels like something is very wrong, and has been from the start. She has been deluding herself. She has been blind to what she doesn't want to see, like she's pretended not to know about the war, and at least – at least Cloud is honest. She wants to cry, but doesn't. He would have been disappointed, the young Cloud, to see him now. His older self. She thinks herself cruel for thinking that.

Moonlight suddenly explodes over the tree. The clouds are suddenly blown away. Tifa stops and blinks. There is something very wrong about that, she thinks dimly, and starts walking again. It's a hollow, sultry sort of summer night.

-

"Do you think – " Tifa starts, stops again. She puts down the pearl earrings she's been toying with. She is distracted, and she is supposed to sell and not talk, but Aerith doesn't seem to mind. She waits patiently for Tifa to finish her train of thoughts. Tifa finds it difficult to find it again, and tries something else instead.

"I thought about what you said, last time," she says. Aerith seems to be genuinely interested, leaning forward with her elbows on the glass display. "I think I want to be a scientist," she says.

"Really? Why is that?" Aerith asks.

"I don't know, it just seems so straightforward." Tifa looks up, smiling a little. "Is that weird?"

"No," Aerith decides, laughing.

"But the next one is, definitely," Tifa warns. She wipes the glass again, for a lack of something to do with her hands.

"What is it?" Aerith asks. Despite everything (her smooth skin, glossy ginger hair, soft leather handbag), she finds herself liking her, this pretty girl who has a life that's one thing away from perfection.

"You're strange," Tifa says. Then, "but this is stranger. You know those people who tasted the king's food before, to see if it's poisoned?"

"Yeah," Aerith says, laughing already. "You want to be – a food taster?"

"If that's what you call them," Tifa says, but she's laughing too. "It's ridiculous. I don't know why I thought of that. I was just passing the food sampling corners the other day."

"It's brilliant," Aerith grins. "I wish I'd thought of that."

"It just seems so simple," Tifa says after they've stopped giggling like girls much younger than them; or maybe she is still young and allowed to giggle, although she doesn't feel it. "You know, the constancy. Of science, the king. God. Do you believe in God?"

"No," Aerith says without hesitation. "I believe in something else. I feel God isn't personal enough."

"That's a weird reason," Tifa says. "I should be working, though. I don't know why I'm talking to you about this."

"You  _are_ working. You're dealing with a childish customer," Aerith says solemnly, then points at the pearl earrings Tifa had been looking at earlier. "I'll have that gift-wrapped, please."

"Yes, ma'am," Tifa says. She takes out the wrapping paper and blue silk ribbon. She asks, off-handedly, her eyes on her the ribbon. "Do you think it's possible to love someone's memory?"

"What do you mean?" Aerith sounds thoughtful, intrigued, and Tifa still doesn't look up.

"You know," she adds, still too casually, fitting the paper around the small indigo box. "Instead of that person – right now."

Aerith laughs. Tifa almost looks up, but she cuts the edge of the ribbon instead, a perfect length on either side.

"I think that's what happens all the time," Aerith says. She takes the gift-wrapped box from Tifa, stares at it for a second, and pushes it across the table back to her.

"It suits you," she says and runs away before Tifa can protest or say anything at all. It's ridiculous, Tifa thinks as she watches Aerith sprint away, nobody (nobody grown-up, anyway) runs like that anymore. Aerith's dress flies in dizzying patterns, as people stop and watch, dismayed, and Tifa takes the box. She is thinking about what Aerith has said. Does it really happen all the time, and has Tifa been just too naïve to hope? She feels like she's been holding onto it far too long. The pearl necklace, that isn't a necklace anymore, and still she can't seem to throw it out.

It could have been something to be proven, like velocity and gravity and why shooting stars leave a smudge of light as they fall. It could have been something without a choice, like laws for life and love and death – something indestructible. It could, even, have been something completely obscure, guesses and stories that can never have proof. She could have been happy with all of that, but instead she is stuck with a broken pearl necklace that is missing one pearl and hopelessly waiting – still waiting – for him to come back.

That boy, who had such wild dreams and such strength – such beauty, shining against his mother's dark cottage, unbeatable, powerful, and madly in love with hope. She had been alive with him, she'd known, back then even as a little girl. When he left something died inside her, and she'd just been waiting for it to come back.

Tifa drops her head. She feels terribly lonely, among so many people. She misses Jessie; she hadn't thought about her in weeks, she thinks with shame, but now she thinks she could understand why she had to leave. She also knows that she isn't brave enough to leave, herself; she knows she will stay, searching for a ghost, and that one moment, when it comes, will have to be enough. Maybe it is, and maybe she's been too naïve to hope otherwise.

-

Cloud feels that Tifa is a little distant next morning. There is something forced in her laugh, the way she folds her sandwich wrapper over and over into a little square. He doesn't think to try and find out why, although it does make him a little anxious and seems to worsen his headache. He watches the small aluminum square reflecting aluminum sun and remembers when nothing was forced between them; remembers those days like a picture from someone else's book, now.

"You look a little sick, Cloud," Tifa eventually says, unfolding the wrapper now. The foil is creased like an old woman's face.

"I have a headache."

"Again?" Tifa frowns. "Why don't you go to the doctor, or something?"

"I don't – " Cloud begins, but Tifa finishes his thought with a laugh that sounds well-practiced.

"You don't trust doctors." For a second it's almost like they have gone back, somehow, even with Cloud here with his pounding headache and Tifa in her navy blue uniform. She's barely touched her lunch.

"Hey," it's Biggs, coming out a little late. The sun shines askew on his face, reflects off the horned glasses he sometimes wears when he is distracted. He sits down on the bench next to Cloud, his usual seat, and doesn't flinch as he says hello. Cloud is confused; he feels guilty, about being cruel, but it's almost like Biggs doesn't remember. Cloud wonders if it's really happened. After all, he dreams about being cruel; being sharp and bloody and destroying himself in an attempt to be brave.

Tifa looks even more anxious, or miserable, but that could be because Biggs is leaving, or because the leaves are weaving a grotesque pattern on her face. They sit under a small gazebo, but the sun still slants and smears dark leaves on her face. She looks like a princess, Cloud thinks briefly, from a forgotten tribe of hunters, drawing with two fingers the black coal and ash.

"Listen, about yesterday … " Cloud starts, impulsively, to apologize. Biggs shakes his head quickly and his eyes dart to Tifa like she shouldn't know about these things; all the uglier parts of the world. People. Cloud.

"No worries, man, we were both tired," Biggs finishes for him. Cloud, his words stolen, feels the headache again. It gets worse in the sun.

"What happened yesterday?" Tifa asks mildly, as if she feels it is her duty to ask, not looking at either of them.

"Nothing, really. Nothing to worry about," Biggs says quickly. Cloud thinks he should have been more convincing;  _nothing_ is the worst excuse. People always wonder, about  _nothing_ , but if you give them something then they are satisfied with nothing at all.

"Biggs was worried about me, and I snapped a bit," Cloud says. A milder explanation of things. Biggs stares at him and Tifa nods. Her earrings dangle; Cloud notices the color, which is nothing, reflecting off sunlight. White pearls.

"New earrings," he says. Tifa looks up, nods again.

"A present from a friend," she says.

"They're nice." Cloud doesn't mention the pearl necklace that would go with the pearl earrings. He isn't sure if she remembers. He'd lied, back then, but he doesn't think she would have noticed.

"Thanks," Tifa says, suddenly awkward, and bites into her sandwich. Biggs looks at them both, clears his throat.

"I'll visit a lot," he says. "I promise."

"That'd be nice," Cloud says. He doesn't thinkhe's lying, but then it is a little difficult to decide with those little men carving his brain with their little gravers. He imagines ominous inscriptions are being chiseled into the gallows of his head.

"Yeah, well, take care, will you?" Biggs tries to make it light, but his voice is haltering and a little lower than usual.

"Of course," Cloud feels like being sarcastic. Zack used to say he was hopeless, making double meaning when only one would do. He said it hurt his head. As it turned out, though, Zack was not so bad himself. It's almost laughable. "I'll try not to be crazy."

They both laugh. Cloud doesn't, pretending that the sun is in his eyes. He remembers he had found all thirty eight of those pearls, back then, but had given back only thirty seven. The wind must have blown it, someone must have swallowed it, she hadn't suspected anything. Cloud doesn't know why he'd kept it; except that it had looked nice, smooth and perfect, and it had reminded him of – until he'd lost it. He doesn't know where. Someone must have found it like he'd found the lipstick. The pearl is not exactly white, not like snow, but a cream-champagne color; he hopes someone makes that distinction. A whiff of hot wind smother against their faces and Cloud winces.

"Is it your head again?" Biggs asks, noticing his pain. Cloud nods; he wonders if yesterday night did happen after all, if Biggs knows about the headache. "Didn't you say you had pills for them?"

"Yeah, but I couldn't find any of them this morning," Cloud says, suddenly remembering that he'd been a little scared. He doesn't think he'll last long without the pills, although they make him pale and murky.

"That's not good." Tifa is worried, sitting up and staring into his face.

"Maybe I left it at the station," Cloud says. "I'll check after work."

"If things get bad…" Tifa says. Cloud doesn't know what she wants to say but she doesn't finish; he nods, anyway, considers telling her about the thirty eighth pearl but doesn't. It sounds naïve and hopeful; something that he's grown out of, and looks back in slight disdain and reluctant nostalgia.

-

Cloud doesn't think he dropped anything in the station, but he goes and checks anyway. He asks the security guard, even, impressing himself with his efforts. The guard shakes his head. As Cloud slumps down in one of the plastic chairs, listening to the echo of announcements crashing with the busy rustle of people, it hits him that he might really have to go to the hospital. Reluctantly he admits that he is scared. There isn't much left that he is scared of, but going to the hospital is like exposing how twisted he is, scribbled words on the doctor's pad making it final, beyond redemption. There's a light tap on his shoulder. Cloud looks up, dazed, and wonders if he's dreaming again.

"Hi," it's the girl with the olive green dress with red and pink flower patterns. Cloud blinks at her. Cloud gestures at the seat next to him and she sits down, still wearing that smile that puts him off his dance with sanity and dreams.

"You're the – the girl with the olive green dress," Cloud says. He remembers that she hasn't told him her name.

"Not anymore," she arches her eyebrow delicately. "Now I'm the girl with the crimson flair skirt. You're the guy who wasn't going anywhere."

Cloud thinks that might have been the ominous inscription in his brain ( _Rest In Peace, The Man Who Isn't Going Anywhere_ ); it makes him laugh, and he does, surprising himself. The girl looks pleased with herself for drawing out that laughter.

"I like your laugh," she says. "Although I don't know what you find so funny."

"What you said. Sounded ominous."

"Oh, so,  _ominous_ is a synonym for funny now?"

"Say your name a hundred times," Cloud explains. "And it starts to sound funny."

"You're weird," she bursts out laughing. "What about today, then? Are you going anywhere? I see you've lost your soldier uniform."

"I'm not a soldier anymore. And no, I'm not going anywhere."

"Hang out here often?" She asks, as if the train station is some teenage hot-spot, neon signs and illegal bars with sapphire blue drinks.

"Not really," he answers truthfully. "You?"

"Sometimes. It's a good place to be alone."

Cloud is anxious that the conversation might die. That she might drift away as she's drifted in, summer breeze that never stays long. Sunset that illuminates everything for just a moment, and then melts into the night. He speaks before she can say her goodbye.

"I'm Cloud," he says. She looks back at him, her eyes shimmering with strange energy. She looks surprised, almost, but then she smiles; her ginger curls embrace her face and completes the picture.

"That was rude of me," she says. "Didn't even introduce myself. Mom will be disappointed. I'm Aerith."

Cloud is inexplicably relieved. somehow, given a name, she seems more real, more permanent. "Your mother sounds like a polite person," he says.

"She was, I'm sure," Aerith says cryptically. Before Cloud can ask, she turns her smile on him again. "What about you? Any family?"

"Never really had one," Cloud says, thinking about Mira. He'd forgiven her, but he doesn't think she has forgiven him. He doesn't know much about her, except that she used to love a game of hide-and-seek and ocean tides for the same reason.

"I meant what I said, about being brave, to fight in the war," Aerith says suddenly. Cloud flinches at the mention of it. He doesn't know which he dislikes more, the memory of the war or the reminder of his bravery – which it wasn't, more cowardice than bravery. Aerith studies his face, her eyelashes a delicate shadow under her eyes.

"I don't know if it was brave." Cloud says. "I didn't join to save lives, I joined to take them."

Aerith doesn't say anything. Evidently she has said enough about the subject; her whole face changes, and she starts talking about different things; it's difficult to keep track of them all, one melts into another like summer breeze turning into green dandelion flowers and tangle of lush trees, though Cloud finds them all fascinating. She talks about the sound of so many people like sound of waterfall, then confesses that she's never actually seen a waterfall, other than in a photo book.

"We used to have one in our town," Cloud remembers. "On the way to school, I'd pass by it every day."

"That must've been so nice," Aerith says, eyes sparking with some imagination; in Aerith's mind, Cloud thinks, the waterfall is a continuous melody of some ancient, magic enchantment and he is a lone figure by is enormity, almost dissolving into the great sound but not quite.

"You're a dreamer, aren't you?" Cloud says.

"How'd you know?" Aerith laughs.

"Takes one to know one."

"Do you live around here?"

"Yeah. Not so far. You?"

"Since forever. So we'll see each other again, maybe," Aerith says, looking at him. Suddenly he has an image of a fire, encroaching on the darkness like a beast, and dancing around it, chasing the ember sparks that explode against the night. He can only nod. "I gotta go, now, to write a letter."

Cloud thinks about asking who it's for, but doesn't. Instead, he says, "That's what you said last time."

"Did I? That's a strange coincidence. But then I write letters a lot."

"I've never written a letter," Cloud realizes, as Aerith stands up to leave. He stands with her.

"You should try it. It's very educational." Aerith says, and turns away with a smile. Cloud waits a few moments before going out the station himself. It's properly dark, outside, but not quiet. The city is loud and the summer is, too, a summer night with cars rushing and people walking. Cloud tries to hear it as the sound of waterfall, something magical. He remembers that his pills are still missing; maybe he needs to visit a doctor, but not today. Maybe not even tomorrow. His headache has disappeared, and it just feels like a distant memory.

 


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 05

-

"Hey, Tifa. The sun's supposed to stop shining so bright today."

Tifa stops, on her usual way to her floor, and stares at Cloud. It occurs to her after a few beats that she's supposed to answer.

"You mean it's not going to be so hot?" She manages, and tries not to blink too much as Cloud flickers a small smile at her. Tifa walks over to his desk, on the pretense of putting her plastic bags down while tying her shoelaces again.

"So they say, at least. Maybe it's going to rain."

"Well, you look cheerful today. Did you find your pills?" Tifa asks, carefully, sweeps her hair out of her eyes to try and see him better. He doesn't look much different, with his hair dangerously close to hiding his eyes and his pale skin that makes him look like a painted figure. Except his eyes look softer, somehow, searching the newspaper and blinking slower than he usually does.

"No, but my headache's gone," he says.

"That's good – " she notices an empty sheet of paper on his desk, and an uncapped black pen. "Were you writing something?" His gaze flickers to the paper, and he shrugs.

"I was gonna write a letter."

"Yeah? To whom?"

"Haven't decided," he says, and smiles a little ruefully. Tifa doesn't say anything for fear of losing this moment; this moment, that feels like her remembrance of the old times. With him and his easy, strange ways that made her laugh; made her see, more than what she would have. Could have.

"Hey, Cloud, maybe those pills haven't been helping you," she says, still cautiously. She doesn't know how long this sunny patch will last. The rain might fall and soak it any moment.

"I wondered about that, too," he agrees. "They numb me, though."

"Maybe you don't need numbing."

Cloud looks at her at that. His face is blank, but not in a scary way; it's like he sees her for the first time, first since he came back. Then a slow smile spreads across his face, like ripples that dance. "Maybe," he says.

-

Tifa is exhilarated. She barely notices how she changes into her uniform, exchanges polite greetings with her colleagues, and walks to her corner. She thinks she smiles more brightly at people; Biggs doesn't come to work anymore, and another guy with neat black hair and rimless glasses has replaced him. Tifa welcomes him, because he looks nervous, and feels good about herself. Remembers a song she's heard a long time ago, the lyrics making no sense to her at the time; she can't remember what it is, though, but she isn't bothered by it. She figures that she must have grown up, for more things make sense now. Cause and effect, she thinks she is a believer once again. Numbness and distance. Time and space. Simple equation, although  _x_ as an independent variable has never made much sense to her. Maybe it will, now.

Tifa wonders, as she starts arranging the earrings in neat rows, if Aerith will show up today. She finds that she is looking forward to seeing Aerith again. Maybe she should start writing letters, too; write to Jessie about her life and never send them; she doesn't know Jessie's new address, anyway. When she sees Aerith, she decides, she's going to tell her that she'd been reckless to give up her faith so easily – her faith in reason.

There is a light set of footsteps. Tifa looks up, expectant, and is surprised to actually find Aerith there; it's almost like her prayer has been answered, but Tifa gladly puts it down as a fine coincidence. Luck. She greets Aerith with a wide smile.

"Hi, Aerith, how're you doing?"

"I was gonna say good, but you look better," Aerith laughs in surprised delight. "Did something wild happen? Have you discovered the sixth sense?"

After only the slightest hesitation, Tifa realizes that Aerith is referring to her dream of becoming a scientist, in the next life; she laughs. "No, not yet."

"I wonder if it's the sense of time? You know, since the fourth dimension is supposed to be that – time."

"That's interesting. Listen, Aerith, I have something to say – " Tifa prepares to tell her about her discovery; not the sixth sense, perhaps, or maybe it is. She prepares to tell her about Cloud (her childhood friend, she will say, which is the truth) and how he's been confused by the war. That perhaps a small bit of conversation this morning is no guarantee at all but it still happened after he lost his pills and – and if she had only been loving his memory, like she'd suspected, then she couldn't be as excited as she is now, excited by possibilities and imagination.

She prepares to say all that, but then she sees Cloud behind Aerith. He is holding her lunch bag that she's left on his desk in a stupefied daze, and Tifa is struck speechless for a moment; because he is not looking at her, although he is calling her name, but looking at Aerith. Aerith turns around. Tifa only sees the back of her head, hair tied up so the delicate string of gold necklace is visible on the back of her neck.

 _Once again,_ Tifa thinks, suddenly remembering the lyrics to that song she's forgotten;  _once again I throw myself down the cliff_. They greet each other, the two of them with dissolving gold hair and flaming red, their eyes twin shades of blue – and Tifa watches, helpless.

"Cloud?"

"Aerith – what're you doing here?"

"I come here a lot, actually. What about you?"

"I work here," Cloud's eyes flicker to Tifa, standing behind them, staring, lost. Aerith follows his gaze, innocently surprised – delighted, at the wonders of the universe that she might call God. Or whatever it is that she secretly believes, that unites lovers and sprinkles them with stardust.

"Oh, you know Tifa, then?" Aerith asks. "We've become good friends."

"Childhood friends," Cloud curiously echoes her thoughts, and Tifa can't figure out the meaning (if there is any) behind those words. They sound bland. True.

"How do you know each other?" Tifa asks the two of them, and they don't notice the strain in her voice. She herself barely recognizes it; she's quick to hide, conceal, lie.

"Coincidence," Cloud says at the same time that Aerith says, "Fate," and they stare at each other. Aerith is the first one to burst out laughing but Tifa is surprised when Cloud smiles, too, slowly and tentatively. She feels like it's a joke, really, to have her beliefs confirmed this way; there  _was_ a reason, then, just not the one she wanted; she had hoped she could be the reason. A vain hope.

"Ran into each other twice, that's it really," Aerith explains. She doesn't suspect; she turns to Cloud with her captivating smile, entangling him with it. Tifa can see everything plainly, calmly, like she's viewing her life backwards.

"Speaking of which," Aerith says brightly. "I found a better place."

"Better place?" Cloud asks, and his eyes don't leave her.

"Yeah, better than the train station. I'll show you sometime."

"That sounds good," Cloud says.

He's cruel, Tifa thinks, but also unblamable; like fate, maybe, and neither can you blame rainfall for deliberately overflowing the river, ruining and decomposing your life.

After Cloud leaves, Aerith turns to Tifa; she looks slightly flustered, shines a little bit brighter around the rim of her eyes. They are like glass, blue glass that reflect.

"Weren't you going to tell me something?" She asks Tifa. Tifa has to fumble for a moment to catch up.

"Yeah, it's nothing. I'll tell you some other time," she says hurriedly. Aerith pauses, and she almost seems like she is leaving. Tifa wishes she would go; the fall looks scarier from up here, the high rainbow she has deluded herself into standing on. Rainbows are nothing but tricks of light, though, nothing corporeal.

Then Aerith asks, "Do you love Cloud?" and Tifa feels the rainbow crumble (like they are real things, like the colors have congested into something real) beneath her feet.

"No," she answers quickly. If Aerith doubts her, she doesn't show. She smiles.

"But you do love somebody, I can tell."

"How can you tell?" Tifa wonders, smiles a little to show her she doesn't believe it.

"You have that desperation about you," Aerith says lightly. "I would know. I love someone too."

"Yeah? Who?" Tifa holds her breath, imagines red and orange and yellow breaking apart, tearing, her feet falling through.

"His name is Kye. Kye Blue," Aerith says, smiles, and leaves with a friendly goodbye, without buying anything. Tifa is left alone, her fall temporarily suspended. She doesn't know whether to be relieved or sad; relieved that she doesn't have to watch them happy together (petty of her, she knows, but she doesn't delude herself into sainthood), or sad that Cloud will be watching and dreaming and longing just as she does; the two of them the same, just not in the same direction. She knows without doubt which one is the nobler sentiment. Also that she cannot be loving him so nobly, if she doesn't wish for him to be happy but instead to suffer together; each in their own misery, alone, together.

Tifa drops her head; she sees a gold necklace that Aerith had been wearing, slim and elegant and unblamable. She looks around and all around it's the same shine, and light, expensive jewelry, and she suddenly wants to run away with them all. She would take the money and go to an island somewhere – where the water is turquoise, and transparent, and she could buy a pair of sunglasses and pretend to be someone glorious; sit at some exotic café, sipping cappuccino, reading a magazine with pictures of girls with their gold and purple eyeliners. A woman strolls, stops in front of her display. Tifa greets her with a professional smile, and recommends the new line of  _Saffira_ necklaces, especially this one, ma'am, with its slender gold chain. It's real gold, 22K, and I think it would suit you.

-

Cloud isn't that surprised to find Aerith waiting for him when he steps out into the darkening light, orange and blue clouds ripped in the middle.

"Hi," she says, and Cloud has to pause a little before answering; he checks the shadow on her hair and the sound of her handbag jingling to decide that she is real. Although he doesn't take his pills now, and he doesn't see faces of strange people in the shadows anymore. "They told me I would find you here," she explains, when Cloud keeps quiet.

"They?" Cloud asks, a little dazed.

"They. Shall we?"

"Where are we going?"

"Somewhere to be alone. Much better than the train station."

"Yeah, about that," Cloud says as he starts walking; Aerith leads the way, her footsteps much lighter than his (she doesn't even sound like she's touching the ground) and her smiles come freely, unhindered. Cloud envies and reveres it. "It's so full of people, though."

"None of them look at you twice. They might as well be squirrels."

"Squirrels?" Cloud laughs. "I'd say mice, maybe." The dying sunlight is casting a long shadow in front of them, and the air smells vaguely of water and pine. Aerith leads them to a path he hasn't been before. It's quieter, trees appearing out of nowhere as they walk.

"That just shows how dark your head is," Aerith scolds, making it a joke and a real accusation at the same time. "Mice. Seriously."

"And what's your head, fairy tale?"

"Yes. That's exactly what it is. You're perceptive, Cloud." Aerith says generously. Then she sprints ahead, in her sandals, and Cloud follows her. He catches up easily. Aerith looks flustered, counting the trees and foxtails on the way.

"It should be close, now," she says.

"What is it?"

"Patience. I said it should be close. Are you always this impatient?"

"I'm not good at waiting," Cloud admits. "I find it suffocating."

"Well, I'm an expert," Aerith says proudly. Then, "we're here." She turns a corner and suddenly the trees clear away, like they're making way for the queen, and Cloud sees it hanging in the sky; the moon; the day has finally succumbed to night as they were walking. Cloud looks around and sees that they are standing on a top of a cliff that overlooks the city. Lights blink beneath like fireflies, and he can see the sea far away. The wind is sweet and heavy, and there are two almost-broken chairs underneath the last of the trees, a knight to the queen maybe, an ancient oak.

"Did you put these here?" Cloud gestures to the chairs, and Aerith laughs. It mingles pleasantly with the big white moon and the night.

"No, someone else, maybe, a long time ago."

"How did you find this place?"

"Isn't it beautiful?"

"Yes," the wind tickles his face, blows his hair out of his eyes. He sees the moon very clearly; even the clouds are well out of her way, tonight, in reverence to their queen. "It's really beautiful."

"Let's sit," she says. "And tell each other stories."

So they sit. So they tell each other stories, and the moonlight makes it feel like just that, stories. Cloud feels detached, like he's looking at himself from somewhere above, wading in cold water and hardly feeling anything. It's a numbing kind of cold.

"Kye is also in the war," she tells him. There is an unfamiliar glint in her eyes when she says his name, like she's trying to imagine his face to the exact detail, to the number of his eyelashes. "That's who I write to, almost every day."

"Do you send all of them?" Cloud asks, helpless in this unfamiliar coldness. The moon is silver and the water is, too, cold but glowing and beautiful.

"No, just the best ones," Aerith says. "I miss him."

"And does he send letters back?"

"Sometimes. When he can."

"Tell me about him," Cloud prompts, feels his pulse beat a little more loudly.

"I think about him in the morning, to make myself get up and start the day. And then at night, to make myself wait." Aerith says. She tells him about a few of the afternoons and evenings with him, that make him feel dizzy with their colors. Cloud sees a glimmer of Kye through her stories; he is a striking figure, tall and cool but with just the right amount of sparks that keeps him warm.

"He sounds perfect," Cloud says. His voice sounds flat in the voluptuous moonlight. Aerith nods contentedly.

"He is. Now, what about you? Anyone you're waiting for?"

"No, not really." Cloud briefly thinks of Tifa; had he been waiting, all those times? (and now –) "I told you, I'm not good at waiting."

"It's a skill," Aerith admits humbly. "Needs practice."

"I guess I  _am_ , kind of, waiting, though." Cloud says in sudden realization.

"For what?"

"For an apology."

"From?"

"I had this friend, I thought – or I think, he is," Cloud says, confused, memories coming at him unbound. He'd had to hold them back with his pills, but now the tangle in his brain is gone and they rush forward with eager intensity. He'd thought it would be more painful than this. Or perhaps it is just this, the moon and Aerith's quiet attentiveness, that frees him for the moment. "I thought, but turns out he isn't from around here."

"What do you mean?" Aerith asks, gently.

"Some people came for me. You know, in the war. This was before we were sort of losing, and they were a bit desperate." Cloud marvels at how easily he speaks now, after years of trying to forget. "They came at night. They weren't supposed to be there, but they came."

"What did they want?"

"You know, information. There was this room… I can't remember much, except it was dark and smelled horrible. I didn't say anything. I was nobody."

"You mean you didn't know anything important?" Aerith makes it sound like a consolation, Cloud thinks, and it relaxes him. He nods.

"No, I didn't. I was just a volunteer soldier, you know."

"So why did they come for  _you_?"

"Well, there was this – man, that I saved by dragging the both of us up to the hills. Zack, was his name."

Cloud is hypnotized. He remembers he tried to make poetry, against the wind and the blood and the three taps of the strange dance that began and ended with the raindrops. For the first time, it feels like such a long time ago; something distant.

"They said… the men that came at night, I mean, that he told them… or something like that. I suppose he was their spy."

"Did you – did you tell anyone?"

"I didn't. They left me for dead but I didn't – die – I got out, I went back, and Zack was there. He looked concerned. We've become good friends, you see." Like a brother he never had; he'd reveled at it, cherished it like a jewel. "And I didn't tell him about the room. I didn't tell anyone."

"Why?" Aerith tilts her head, and Cloud doesn't read anything but a curious acceptance; she understands. He is relieved that there is no pity; he has never been the one to stand pity – rather hatred and disgust, than pity.

"I don't know," Cloud admits. "I had a good reason at the time. I forget."

"What happened to you and Zack?"

"We were still good friends. We finished our time together, and came here. He went back home. Gongaga – it probably doesn't exist. Probably a code name." Cloud is amused. "I don't even know his real name."

"Well," Aerith says, after a pause. "I must say, your story is much more interesting than mine."

"I thought so, too." Cloud says humbly. Aerith laughs at his expression, her own eyes crumbling into crescent shapes.

"So you're waiting for his apology, then?"

"Maybe. But it doesn't matter. He's gone, now."

"Do you hate him?"

"The strange thing is," Cloud pauses, to remember this moment. He takes in the grass under his feet and the rickety squeak of the wooden chair, the looming shadow of leaves and the rustling sound they make. One, two, three. "I don't think I do. I really don't."

Aerith smiles. "Maybe he didn't know he was selling you out. Maybe it was a mistake."

"Well, I admire your optimism."

"I admire your courage," Aerith says promptly. Cloud tries to argue that it hadn't been anything like courage – more cowardice, is what he sees, but Aerith doesn't wait for his reply. She gets up and the moon is on her face again, silver and soft. She holds out her hand and Cloud takes it although he can very well get up himself. They walk themselves into the silent army of trees again, and the moonlight hides herself behind them. Cloud expects the enchantment to wear off soon, but it doesn't. It lasts well until after they say their goodbyes, Aerith disappearing into a white dot and even after Cloud lets himself into his house. He sits on his bed and feels empty, hollowed out, but strangely content; free.

-

When Biggs comes to visit, he is a changed man. He looks tired and thin, but also more alive; Tifa envies him for it.

"How's it going? Did you find a place to live?" Tifa asks, handing him the cup of coffee she takes from a vendor. Biggs accepts it, gives her a bottle of orange juice in return that looks expensive; real fruit, no artificial sweetener.

"I bought this for you and Cloud on the way," he says, grinning.

"Thanks – it looks fancy."

"Yeah, well, I remember you like orange juice, so," Biggs shrugs. They head out to their old lunch spot under a small gazebo in the back, where a few fellow employees are smoking and chatting. Some of them recognize Biggs. He waves back at them.

"I did find a place. I don't know if you can actually live in it," Biggs jokes. "It's just wide enough to put a bed in – seriously. But it's near school, so that's good."

"It is," Tifa agrees. She uncaps the fancy orange juice and belatedly remembers that she's supposed to shake it, first, so all the unprocessed orange grains can mix properly.

"So – how about you?"

"How about me," Tifa laughs, suddenly. "I don't know, Biggs. Nothing's much changed. I'm still selling necklaces."

"You say that like it's a bad thing," Biggs seems startled. "Well – you could quit, you know. Do anything. Didn't we talk about this?"

"I guess I could," Tifa says. She feels bad about being so bitter; ashamed, somehow, like she is admitting her own defeat. With all the things that happened, she's never been one to admit defeat. It is not a matter of personal achievement, as it is a matter of things happening too quickly. They are like long wires coming out from nowhere, shooting out near her legs, and she's expected to jump over every one or be pierced.

"What about Cloud? Is he, you know, okay?"

"Yeah," Tifa says quickly. "He's okay. He's good."

"No more headaches?"

"No. No more headaches."

"Oh, did he see a doctor?"

Tifa thinks about what she could say. Cloud is, also, a changed man; it seems like Tifa is the only one who's stayed the same. It's always been that way. Even as her village burned, she had remained a single point of no change, sent away before the fire could touch her.

"No, not exactly," Tifa finally says. "He's found a new friend."

"Yeah?" Biggs frowns. He tries to joke about it, seeing Tifa's unnaturally smooth face. "And who's this friend – a miracle worker? I mean, we both tried so hard."

"She's – " Tifa searches for a word that might describe Aerith. "Lively. Carefree. Rich. Pretty."

"Wow," Biggs says, drily, and searches Tifa's face. She keeps it neutral. She still finds herself liking Aerith – maybe for the same reasons as Cloud, even – and doesn't want her name marred by such ugly feeling as jealousy.

"She's really nice," Tifa says hurriedly, so ease her own guilt. "And she keeps him, you know, at ease – so I'm happy for him."

"And you're okay with this?" Biggs says, carefully. "Are they going out together?"

"No. Not really." Tifa pauses. She thinks she might have answered too quickly. "Aerith already has a boyfriend who's fighting in the war. They're just friends." She feels relieved saying this, some kind of security, even though Aerith and Cloud are spending more time together lately; Tifa still feels better, labeling them as friends and trying not to see Cloud's smiles that come easily nowadays. Even to Tifa, he is more generous and easy.

"Well, okay," Biggs considers. "But that Cloud, he's gonna regret it someday."

"Regret what?"

"Taking you for granted," Biggs says, defiantly, and its unexpected fierceness touches her; she laughs; shaken, bitter, moved.

"That's nice of you to say, but you know – I really don't think he will."

Biggs doesn't like that she laughs about this, but Tifa can't help herself. She nudges him on his arm, playfully, still smiling.

"I'm gonna regret this, too, aren't I? Taking you for granted."

"Regret it as hell," Biggs gives in grudgingly, a grin slowly breaking out of his face. "He can be so dim, sometimes."

"Yes," Tifa agrees solemnly. She can't help but think, though, that Biggs has got it the other way around. She suspects that it is her who's been taking Cloud for granted, and now – and now, she has no reason to be bitter. Not really. Aerith is prettier and funnier than she is. Cloud is – although he is broken, fractured in a way that even he doesn't properly understand, he is mad and beautiful and she's always known that he was destined for greater things. Perhaps that had been why she never told him.

-

It's almost a playful rhythm. Trees in the wind and their smaller branches tangled by the air, making poetry. The music she puts on; it's almost playful, but not quite. Aerith says they should dance and Cloud tells her he's not so good at dancing. Which is true, almost.

"But you  _must_  be good at it," Aerith says, getting up and dragging him along. Cloud gets up reluctantly – or he pretends it, feigning reluctance and playful exasperation. He feels his heart beat, which he has left on the floor, it seems, and can't climb back fast enough. It vibrates within his chest painfully. The room is a big one, sort of like a living room but without any sofas or family pictures. There is a dead fireplace at the far wall, a thick, ornate carpet on the floor but nothing else; the windows are all draped with deep green curtains and light doesn't crack through. Cloud can't tell if it's day or night.

"Your house is strange," he tells her, stalling, even as she hops away from him, inviting him to follow. "It's creepy."

"Thanks, I try," Aerith jokes. "Actually I have two sitting rooms – this one, I converted into a ballroom."

"A ballroom? Do you have balls often?" Cloud asks, lightly, and Aerith bursts out laughing. It's a guitar interlude; her laughter finds spaces between the strums.

"Just with you. And, before, with Kye." She grabs his hand and makes him hold hers up while she does a twirl. She is an elegant dancer; her hair and yellow skirt complete the picture, a blur of colors like red and yellow headlights smeared by the rain.

"What does he do? Or – did, before the war?" Cloud asks, holds her hand tight.

"He was a musician," she tells him. "But not a very talented one."

"Why are you so rich?"

"My parents were. Why do you have so many questions?" Aerith accuses, but in a playful tone. Cloud gets bold. He steps with her, back when she comes forward and forward when steps back.

"I knew it. I knew you'd be a good dancer." Aerith is delighted.

"I just want to know, that's all," Cloud answers Aerith's question. "You're fascinating."

The music gets faster, harsher, the singer's voice reaching higher notes. Cloud can't tell if he's singing about death or bliss. Maybe both.

"You say that like I'm your study subject," Aerith says.

"Maybe you are," he answers. Aerith laughs silently.

"Maybe you're right. I do need to be analyzed, someday."

"I'm good at analyzing stuff." Cloud says. The music stops, suddenly, leaving guitar prints in the air that still vibrates. Aerith stops dancing and he does too. Aerith stares up at him, a smile tugging at her lips. Cloud manages to think of something to say. "Why did you think I would be good at dancing?"

"Because," Aerith says, not looking away and still with that half-smile. "Because Kye was, too."

"That's not a reason," Cloud tells her. "I'm not your Kye."

"No, you're not my Kye."

-

Aerith takes him, one day, to a forgotten park. There are almost no one strolling about, the trees and bushes are grown out, spilling onto the road. It's a big park, though; the empty playgrounds and the empty benches, an artificial stream that doesn't flow anymore. They go at night, after Cloud's shift is done. The winds have now lost their sweltering clutch, but sweeps about instead and ruffles their hair. When Cloud passes a wooden bench in the dim lamplight, he swears he sees someone sitting there. But when they look back, the bench is empty and there is no one around.

"Maybe it was a trick of light, or a shadow," Cloud says, frowning. Aerith is much more excited and frightened than he is, grabbing his arm and peering up at his face.

"Are you sure you saw someone? Describe them."

"Yeah, I think I did. It was a man – wearing a long overcoat – "

"In this weather?"

"It's strange. I could have sworn he was looking at me."

"You know what I think?" Aerith says. "I think you saw a ghost."

"I don't believe in ghosts," he insists.

"Oh, everybody believes in them – many are just too scared to admit it," Aerith says. They start walking again, and Cloud looks uncertainly at the tree shadows and a couple of people walking some distance away. He wants to ask if she sees them too, but doesn't.

"So you believe in ghosts?" He asks instead. Aerith looks at him, her eyes twinkling, half of her face shadowed by the night.

"Well, yeah. I don't see why not. There are so many inexplicable things happening."

"Do you think all the dead people end up as ghosts?" Cloud asks, thinking of Mira. He'd hoped she would've found peace at the end, but maybe she found clarity instead. All the dead men, too, Tirrel Pamber who used to joke about the weather and the lipstick, would they be wandering around with half-faces and no arms?

Aerith looks at Cloud's face. "No," she says, but doesn't explain. "You know, Kye is very fond of overcoats."

"Why do you say that?" Cloud narrows his eyes, represses the urge to look back again to see if the man is still sitting on that bench, looking at him. "He's not dead, is he? You said he writes back."

"Yeah…" Aerith trails off.

"You're strange. And creepy." Cloud accuses her. Aerith fakes indignation, hitting his shoulder lightly.

"Way to flatter a girl, Cloud," she says, laughing.

"Well, I don't need to flatter you, do I?" Cloud says. "You're already enchanted."

"That's true," she admits.

They are both enchanted. Cloud feels it like a tingle in the air between them; like they have, together, stolen someone else's time and are borrowing its ease and bliss. Cloud finds out that they have both lived their lives preferring to be alone in the crowd. Not to be affected, not to be crushed. He tells her about Mira and she tells him about her parents, who were rich and miserable and went to sleep together one night and never woke up again. For two people who prefer to be alone, though, they reach out with something almost like desperation; sometimes Cloud thinks he can see a crack in her, just a fracture on the surface of something deeper. Aerith is wild and free; she lives by a different time than the rest of the world. There are many clocks in her house but they all tell different times. Yet there is something slightly wrong, in her too-easy smiles and strange observations that never fail to fascinate him. She finds music everywhere and loves to dance to all of them. Cloud learns to dance, with her, waltz and swing and jazz. With her, he feels, he doesn't need to be alone. He doesn't need to be anything; only the music, the notes, and the moment where his foot touches hers, one, two, three, the rhythm of the drums.

They visit the cliff many times. Mostly at night, even though the moon isn't usually majestic like that first night, but sometimes even when the sun is out. One day, Aerith peers down at the edge and says, "I wonder what it will be like, falling."

"Why do you wonder?" Cloud asks, looking over at her face. The sun is bare but not too strong. Pale, like the sky today, like it's about to disappear into white.

"I don't know. Don't you wonder?"

"I guess. Sometimes." Cloud looks down with her, at the tangle of treetops and curling branches. Houses far away. Buildings, railroads. "I imagine it'd hurt."

"I know that," Aerith laughs. "But you know, maybe it'll be beautiful too."

"It will?" Cloud asks, looks away, grabs her wrist lightly. He's suddenly afraid that she might test her theory. She will die with a smile on her face, he thinks, but it won't be so beautiful when they find her body broken and limbs in wrong angles. But, the fall, "maybe. It might feel like flying, for a while."

"Yeah, but it will hurt." Aerith says, smiles, and holds his hand. Cloud can't tell if she wants to assure him that she won't try falling, or if she wants them to fall together. The thought briefly reaches his eyes, the image of the two of them falling, flying, and Cloud thinks she has a point; it  _will_ be beautiful, until it hurts, and then you die.

"Better not try," Cloud says. Aerith nods.

"Maybe it's enough," she says, thinking. "That I imagine it to be beautiful."

"I have no idea what you're talking about." He laughs. Adds, "as usual."

"That's why you love me," she teases, leading him back to their rickety chairs, away from the edge of falling.

"I guess so," Cloud admits. The air smells a little wet. He thinks it might rain, tomorrow.

-

" _What the hell happened?" He's frantic, angry, scared. Cloud stares up at him with wonder._

" _You sound worried," he says._

" _Of course I'm worried. Where have you been?"_

" _War."_

" _Cloud – "_

" _It's okay, Zack," Cloud says. "I'm alive, aren't I?"_

" _You scared me, kid," he deflates, slumps by his bed. The medical tent is wet with rain – bad for the wound, they say, before bandaging his arms and covering everything (the ugliness of it, the cruelty) with white._

" _Don't call me kid," Cloud says. "You're not much older than me."_

" _Oh, but I am. You have no idea." Zack chuckles tiredly._

" _No," Cloud considers him. He'd thought he would be scared. Angry. Frantic. He is calm, though, and his calmness seems to soothe Zack as well. "I don't think I do."_

" _So you're really not going to tell me?" Zack says, testy, a little weary. Maybe he knows – Cloud thinks, then decides that he doesn't really care._

" _I don't know," he says. "I don't remember."_

" _They say that can happen," Zack says, as a consolation. "Maybe that's better."_

" _Yeah, I think so."_

" _I kept your stuff," Zack says and holds out his few belongings, neatly packed. "They wanted to move you out of the tent, but it wasn't official, so – "_

" _Thanks," Cloud sits up and looks through them. He notices that the pearl is lost, but doesn't say anything._

" –  _and I told them, that kid's tough as hell, he'll crawl in again."_

" _Don't call me kid."_

" _Okay, okay. You're stubborn."_

" _So are you, lieutenant Fair." Cloud doesn't know why he says it. Maybe he's looking for a flinch, a trace of a lie, smell of gasoline, but Zack isn't disturbed; almost like it's his real name._

" _Hey, it's raining outside," he says, after a short chuckle. "You like rain, don't you?"_

" _Yeah."_

" _I don't know why. I hate it. You're strange. And creepy."_

" _Thanks," Cloud laughs. "You're not so bad yourself."_

" _Hey – " Zack has a strange face on, between laughter and something else. He looks uncomfortable like he's daring something scary. "Good to have you back."_

 


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 06

-

Rainy days are the worst. There doesn't seem to be a good reason for it, but when bad things happen, it is usually raining. Every season comes with a different kind of rain, but summer rain is like an incision in the heat, splitting and dissolving it but not quite managing, like a sloppy surgeon. The humidity lingers. Sometimes the entire sky would darken and shadow the rest of the world, which Cloud prefers to drizzles that confuse you between light and dark. If it is going to rain, he thinks, it's better if it does properly. Sometimes Cloud thinks that has been his downfall, that need to take things all the way and don't stop until you get burned, you drown, you fall. And then you die.

This morning it rains. Cloud wakes to the sound of it, which pecks his head like a chisel (no doubt completing that inscription –  _You are not going anywhere_ ), and stares at the ceiling which is dark and spotted with rain. He's never gotten around to getting a curtain for the small window on the wall beside his bed, and weather pours through each morning without invitation. Sun, in its varying yellowness, and dark weather when clouds are dripping gray, and sometimes this – rain – in green and blue lights, small water drops magnified into something big and slippery. Cloud sits up, expecting a headache, and isn't disappointed. He almost welcomes it now – the headache, like an old friend. He had found his pills, after all, under the bed to where the jars have rolled but miraculously remained intact. They sit on his bedside table, now, but he needs to get a glass of water. So he stands up and experiences the world dancing around him for a while (Aerith had taught him this one, when he described his symptoms. She wanted him to make art of it) until it steadies again and he can walk the few steps to the kitchen and the tab.

Mornings like these, he feels like a figure in a storybook; Cloud amuses himself with the image of himself while he waits for the cup to fill; standing alone in front of a fire or waterfall and his back (always his back) lonely and almost engulfed, but not quite. He figures Aerith is wearing off on him. She is the one with all these wild imagination and pictures, fairytale endings and romantic loneliness. Cloud enjoys listening to her talk. She likes to make life out like a vast, complicated piece of art where every accidental stroke is a mark of genius and every color is bold and beautiful. Cloud tells her that not every artist is a master, but she says that his artist is. Cloud finds himself wanting to believe that.

The cup fills with water and Cloud turns off the tab. He goes back to his bedside and takes out three pills, pours them into his palm.

Outside the sound of rain is playing music that sounds like one of Aerith's guitar pieces. She prefers coarse voices and raw sounds to pretty melodies and sweet piano accompaniments.

In the end, he doesn't take the pills. It has become more and more irregular lately. More and more, he finds himself not taking them; sometimes forgetting, sometimes testing, sometimes rebelling. Sometimes it's hard even to breathe, on the day that he doesn't, but sometimes he feels better than ever. Like he's back to his old self (those days with Tifa, where she had been his sole reason for facing his mother and the other kids and the people from the city – but he'd had a purpose, then, and a dream) and on those days he thinks clearly. He regrets everything he's done, solemnly makes a vow to put things right again, until the pain takes over some three days later and he forgets to care.

He figures, though, that today is a safe day. Today he's meeting with Aerith, and she hasn't told him their plans but Cloud trusts her. If she asks, with her playful smile, to try flying together (It would be beautiful, wouldn't it?), he figures he will take her hand anyway. He trusts her to know.

Cloud washes and dresses. The weather is verging on chilly, even, the summer almost slipped away. He pulls his sleeves down over his arms, the ugly scars that he almost forgets these days. Once he had been constantly aware of them, like an itch or a memory almost remembered, afraid that Zack might find out.

He takes a jacket and leaves the phone, having forgotten to charge it again. At the last moment he hastily grabs a smaller bottle of pills that he'd filled last night and puts it into his jacket pocket, just in case. He tries to find an umbrella but can't see it anywhere; but being wet doesn't bother him. He vaguely remembers lending it to Tifa a few days ago, after hers got ripped, so she must still have it. Cloud figures a little bit of cool water would be good for his head, anyway, which always feels too hot and stuffed.

But already, his headache is fading.

-

When she wakes up to the shimmering green shadow of the rain, there is a voice message from Aerith. She is inviting Tifa to a tea party, at her house. Tifa has been to Aerith's house a few times; sometimes alone and other times with Cloud, and she suspects that she likes it better than either of them (Aerith finds it too big for one person; Cloud thinks the darkness is eerie, and no amount of electrical light is going to stomp it out completely). Tifa likes the quietness of it and the clean, graceful manner with which both light and darkness fall through the large windows. She doesn't speak about this to them. She mostly keeps to herself, although they are both very attentive (Even Cloud, these days, with his eyes fixing on her every time she speaks, like how they used to be able to find each other's words in the silence, before.) and regards everything she says with a seriousness that sometimes feels overwhelming. It's almost like they are afraid to fall. Tifa is their – anchor, maybe, or a kite line – that keeps them grounded. She doesn't begrudge the job. It's nice that they need her.

Only, she wouldn't mind falling – or flying – herself. Sometimes.

She is with them on some of their adventures, exploring parts of the city that she hadn't known after years of living in it. But she is busier than they are; busy with work, busy with distracting herself to join every time. It isn't like it was with Biggs. Biggs had been the arbiter and the anchor himself. With him, she had been free to wander and drift.

Tifa leaves the voice mail. It's her day off, and it's raining softly, and she would like to visit the house but also she is tired. She decides she isn't going. She'll tell Aerith that she slept in – and Cloud would know (if he remembers) that Tifa has never been the one to sleep in, ever, but he won't say anything. Maybe he would even guess why. Tifa is too tired to care.

She gets up, intending to make some breakfast for herself. She figures maybe she should have gotten a job in a kitchen somewhere. If she could go back in time she certainly would; Tifa enjoys the rules of cooking, the peppers and apricots and drops of olive oil. It's like a dance, almost, and she knows almost by instinct when to twirl the bottle, tap dance with the bowl of flour.

She has almost reached the refrigerator when she notices an unfamiliar umbrella leaning against the counter. It takes a few seconds for her to realize that it's Cloud's, the one he'd lent her days ago. She had meant to give it back the next day, but it hadn't rained for a few days and she's forgotten. It's raining today, though, and Tifa feels guilty for keeping it. She knows Cloud doesn't mind getting wet but she hastily gets dressed and takes the umbrella out anyway. Maybe he hasn't left home yet, and she can give it to him. Of course, then her cover for sleeping late is blown – but Cloud won't say anything. Tifa can't decide if that's because he cares, or doesn't.

Outside, it's raining more than she'd thought. It isn't a noisy sort of rain, though, rather a fine mist that is soaking the air silently and she only sees the slim combs of rain against the headlights of the passing cars. For no particular reason, it seems, she suddenly misses Jessie. The cars and their rhythmic windshield wipers, she finds, are similar to the methodical way in which Jessie had applied herself to everything. A gift wrapping, a conversation, a belief. Even the method of her leaving had been precise and clean, leaving no traces and no photographs to be remembered. When she left, she left, cut out everything and expected everyone else to do the same. Tifa can't reach her now even if she wants to, and she wonders if she ever leaves Cloud and Aerith she would do the same. Probably not. Not like Cloud, anyway.

Tifa regrets, though, that the entire time she was with Jessie, she had been waiting for someone who wasn't there. Sometimes it had been the only thing getting her to work in the mornings, and bringing her home at nights. She remembers that first dream, which now seems to have been a strange prevision, with the grapefruits and Cloud smiling. Some sinister voice in her ear whispers, even as she tries to block it out;  _maybe you would have been better off if you'd never found him._

Tifa denies it, of course. She can't decide if that's because she cares, or doesn't.

-

"You're soaked," Aerith says, but she sounds amused by it. Cloud tries to apologize for ruining her carpet. She waves him off.

"I couldn't find my umbrella," Cloud says. "The rain didn't look too heavy, but I guess looks can be deceiving."

"People tend to be distracted by pretty things, yes," Aerith laughs. "I thought we'd have tea or something, since it's raining."

"How are the two connected?" Cloud wonders, following Aerith down the corridor and her other sitting room. She doesn't seem to have heard him. This room has a curved sofa and a gleaming mahogany coffee table, even a small framed picture on the mantle of the fireplace. It's of her parents, holding a baby Aerith and looking pleased.

"That's a nice picture," Cloud comments. Aerith glances at it, as if she has to remind herself what picture he is talking about – like there are many more of them, arranged in chronological order.

"Oh, yeah, it is. I look like my mom, huh? Except the nose. That's from my grandma," she says. "Do you have a picture of your mother?"

"No," Cloud says quickly. "I lost it. But I've been told I take after her, too." In more than one way, had been their insinuation. Aerith seems to consider him, like she's trying to imagine the female version of him. Then she gestures at the sofa.

"Wait here, sir, while I try to find some cups and tea."

"I thought you would have a maid or something, in this big house."

"Used to. Now I don't. I don't really need them," Aerith says lightly.

"I wouldn't want to ruin your sofa, though. I should dry off first. Where's the bathroom?"

"Oh, it's just down by the corridor," Aerith says, and disappears through another door that presumably leads to the dining room and kitchen. Cloud makes his way to the corridor she's pointed out, picking his steps carefully to minimize the damage.

After drying off (the towels are big and soft, probably more expensive than all his clothes combined), Cloud walks to the sitting room to wait for her but takes a wrong turn, somehow, and pushes open the wrong door (though they  _do_ look exactly the same). For a moment he is confused; the size and structure of the room is also exactly the same, only instead of sofa and coffee table, this room is filled with tall bookcases that are packed with books of all kinds. Neat rows of encyclopedia, heavy leather-bound books of history and religion and art, colorful novels and storybooks. Cloud stares, enchanted, wondering if she's read all of them. Among the bookcases that almost block the windows completely, there is a lone table with an ornately carved lamp casting a yellow light. The sound of rain is muffled and more distinct at the same time, almost like the books were whispering it. Cloud makes his way to the table in the middle of the room, stepping around the stray volumes on the floor. It is heavily carpeted and his feet don't even rustle.

There are several books on the table. Cloud looks through them with interest; one book, presumably the one she's reading now, is open and Cloud picks it up.  _Universe Expanded._ Cloud can't tell if it's a novel or a science book. He's about to read the back cover, when another book at the top of the pile catches his attention.

It's a children's storybook; old and well-worn, like she's read it more times than she can count. Cloud had never had books like that (Mira had preferred to do the storytelling herself), and it fascinates him. It's all gold and blue, with flowers and horses and dragons in curving drawings. Cloud picks it up. It opens easily to a page in the middle of the book. He looks at the picture, first, a gold-edged depiction of a dragon breathing diamond and gold fire, a knight on a white horse and the stone walls speckled with star-shaped silver. Then he reads the four-line narrative.

Something strikes him. Cloud quickly tries to put the book down, but changes his mind and reads it again. He stays, for a moment, thinking. Then Aerith calls distantly and he puts the book back where it was. He hurries out of the room, and when Aerith offers him a steaming cup of black tea, he takes it and doesn't mention that he's been to her library.

-

Tifa knocks and rings the bell, but no one answers. The logical assumption is that Cloud is already out. Either he had a spare umbrella or he still doesn't mind getting wet. But Tifa can't shake off the strange feeling, a déjà vu, of standing in front of a similar door not too long ago (although it seems ages, millennia) and knocking, calling, waiting. She had not seen Jessie after that, just heard a voice through the phone that sounded like Jessie, borrowing someone else's words and emotions. It scares her. Tifa decides she's being stupid, though, and bends to leave the umbrella by the door. She notices a small bottle by the foot of it. She picks it up, already guessing what it is, and sees that it's a colorful assortment of Cloud's pills; she knows he gets headaches when he doesn't take them. She leans against the door and calls Cloud's phone, but the signal dies out. Then she tries calling Aerith. She picks up after three rings.

" _Tifa, hey, did you get my message?"_ says Aerith's cheerful voice. Tifa dresses her own in casual lightness, although she doesn't really know why she does.

"Yes, just did. I woke up late. Hey, listen, is Cloud there? I think he left his pills."

" _He's just in the sitting room. I'm trying to find some tea – I know I put it somewhere –"_

"Oh, okay. I guess I'll be over with the pills, then," Tifa says. She waits for Aerith to make delighted comments, returns some of her own, and hangs up. She wants to be furious at Cloud for not being careful enough and dropping important stuff like that, but doesn't. She's never been able to stay angry at him, not even when he got into stupid fights and not even when he left her, at the end, promising to come back. To be fair, though, there hadn't been anything to come back  _to_ , soon enough. Tifa pushes herself wearily from the door and walks out into the rain again.

-

When she arrives at the house, the door is unlocked but there is no one in the hallway or the sitting room. The house is, as always, large and quiet, a silent consciousness watching her perform. For a moment Tifa is scared; the house empty, the door open, nobody answering – but then she hears a sound.

She follows it almost automatically, before she even realizes what it is. As she gets nearer to the source of the sound (a smaller chamber connected to the second sitting room, that Aerith insists is a ballroom now), it morphs itself into a piano sound. It's simple and a little hesitant, but full of – something – that Tifa is suddenly afraid to see. She stops in the middle of the bare room. She puts the small bottle of pills down on the mantle of the dead fireplace. All the windows are heavily curtained except for one, and gray-blue light of the rain tickles through. The sound of raindrops hitting the window is insistent, with the pale melody of the piano makes an eerie orchestra. Not eerie – Tifa corrects herself, forcing herself to step a little closer – the melody is rather sweet. Not a lot of colorful notes in it, but simple and sweet. Light pours out the half-open door onto the floor. When Tifa steps a little uncertainly forward, the music abruptly ends and she is startled into stopping again. Then comes Aerith's voice.

"That's all I remember."

"I like it," Cloud's voice is almost like she remembers but lower, grown up, still unstable. Still scared, it seems, but getting better. Maybe he doesn't need any pills now. He's found his heaven, his God, now and Tifa starts to back away.

"You should have a go."

"I can't really play."

"Make something up, then."

Tifa remembers a piece he used to play, the one he probably still remembers, because Cloud doesn't easily forget. He doesn't forgive, either. All these years she's tried, he's never forgiven her for being – everything he was not, could not be, rich and popular and easy. Even as a child she'd felt it. Cloud doesn't know to forgive her because he doesn't know that there is anything to forgive. Or maybe he does, now, and maybe that is why she recognizes the song that comes from the room. It's tentative at first, notes merely following each other as if testing their steps in the steep mountain, but then something else weaves them together. Tifa can't remember the title of this piece; some number or other, instead of a proper title, so they had called it  _Summer_. Because the left hand plays just like the incessant hum of summer noises, wind and insects and green leaves, and the right hand makes a melody that sounds like either like the full golden sun or the rain. Right now it sounds like rainwater rushing from the sky to the ground. Tifa doesn't make a noise as she leaves.

They had called it  _Summer_ together, they had spent summers together. Now Tifa doesn't know if he even remembers; maybe he doesn't. Maybe only his fingers, falling carelessly on the keys, remember and Aerith will ask him what it is called. Maybe they will give it a new title – together. In a cruel twist of irony, it will be called Summer again – because outside it's raining and summer is ending. But it's a stolen name, a stolen memory, and now her childhood is stolen.

Next, Aerith will turn up one day with a pearl necklace just like her own – thirty seven pearls, in neat rows, but only prettier.

-

"That's a pretty song," Aerith says, when he's finished. Cloud listens for the echo of the last note. He's always loved playing piano, but sneaking into Tifa's room when she was supposed to be practicing had been the only way. She had wanted to give it to him, said his music always sounded better than hers. It's all about weaving the notes together, Cloud had said.

"I never could get the hang of playing – well, any kind of musical instrument," Aerith is reflecting. She's sitting on the edge of the long stool they share, tentatively pressing a few keys. A, G, and then E, the notes quaver.

"It's all about weaving the notes together," Cloud says, remembering. He plays a left hand to match her bare sounds. "You know, imagining it."

"I don't think I know what you mean." Nonetheless, she looks fascinated by the way her non-melody becomes something like music.

"Imagining that something is pulling them all together, in one line, like – like blood," Cloud explains. "How blood runs through every part of our bodies and connects us, like that."

"So – what was it? The song?"

"I don't know the actual title," Cloud confesses. "But we used to call it Summer."

"I can see why. It sounds like it."

Cloud watches her. How a strand of hair falls from her ears, how she holds herself up like she's standing up to a dragon with nothing but a mirror and laughter. He tries to remember; every detail.

"Yeah. It's almost over, though. The weather is cooler," he hears himself speak.

"It will be summer again next year. Probably."

"Probably," he says, although he doesn't feel it. Cloud feels, inexplicably, like summer is slipping away now and forever; that it will indeed be hot and humid again next year, but it will be a different kind of summer, the kind that comes after spring; and not the kind that stays in the memory forever, as something unrelated either to spring or fall, something that gleams white; like pearls.

When they come out, the outside is darker and the rain has gotten heavier. Aerith walks to the fireplace while Cloud peers out of the window at the water running down in dots and longer streaks. The outside is merely blurs of green and chalk gray.

Aerith walks up to him and hands him something, a bottle of pills that Cloud recognizes as his own. Her face is strangely drawn, flickering in the half-light. Cloud figures he must have left it here, on one of his visits. He takes it.

"I don't need those as much, these days," he tells her.

"That's good," Aerith says, smiling softly. "It means you're getting better, doesn't it?"

Cloud doesn't answer. He echoes her smile. "Let's bring your record player," he says.

"Yeah, okay. Let's."

He tries not to see a shadow in her grin, but he is suddenly reminded of a similar smile, a long time ago.  _You're gonna be great, Cloud._

 _Well,_ he thinks, oddly amused.  _That had been the plan._

_-_

_The king was very angry. He sent armies after the dragon, but the dragon's castle was well-hidden and enchanted. It was said that only the bravest and the noblest man could find the way. The king promised great glory and gold for whoever could slay the evil dragon and rescue his daughter. For there were many dragon slayers in the land, but this dragon was the grandest and fiercest of them all; it could hide among the clouds and roam over the ocean. It seemed there was little chance that the princess could be rescued._

-

It's a bleak sky. Gray clouds roll and grumble, as if to spit out more rain, but only a salty wind keeps pushing the water and makes it explode against the black rocks. The sea, today, is all gray-green and white foams, high tides and sprinkles on their faces. Aerith doesn't say much, and Cloud is content to cherish the silence and let it soak in with the continuous sound of the waves.

There are moments in life that are sharper than the rest. Not only sharper, but bigger and brighter too. Every detail, even the small spot on her canvas shoes that is blackened by the drops of sea. The rocks gleaming with water and pallid sunlight like living creatures. The feeling of fabric brushing against his arms, rustle of wind. As if his thoughts take a life of their own and pulsate through the saline air, Aerith suddenly echoes his thoughts.

"I feel everything so sharply today, it's strange," she says. Cloud looks at her in wonder.

"I was thinking the same thing."

"If our lives were storybooks…" she pauses, to push a lock of hair behind her ear, as the wind messes it up. "How important do you think this moment is?"

"Very important," Cloud decides. "Maybe it'll get a chapter of its own."

"Or," Aerith suggests, her tone light and playful. Cloud can't see her face, because the wind is too dizzying and it's just a blur of red hair tangled like ivy. "You'll forget it soon. And all of our time together will be – just a sentence."

"What's brought this about?" Cloud wonders, frowning, but Aerith only laughs.

"During his twenty-first summer, young Cloud…"

"Twentieth. My birthday's next week."

"Oh, alright. Twentieth summer, young Cloud meets a charming girl called Aerith. They go to the beach a lot, dance and have tea pBiggss. It was nice."

"Why do you say it like that?" Cloud is suddenly frightened. He doesn't know of what, even though the answer glimmers somewhere at the edge of his consciousness. Buried beneath some memory, like live embers almost hidden by gray ashes.

"It's the weather, maybe. Gets me down. I'm saying, you might forget. Very soon, even." Aerith says. She is not looking at Cloud but at the horizon that only barely distinguishes between water and land.

"No, I won't." Cloud says. He tries to catch her eyes. "I'll remember this forever."

"You sound noble," Aerith says, laughing softly, and finally turns to meet his eyes. Cloud is relieved to find she is not crying, though he doesn't know what made him think that she was. "Like a brave knight."

"Fighting a dragon?" Cloud asks innocently. If Aerith suspects something, she doesn't show. But he figures it isn't an unnatural association, anyway.

"Exactly."

For a long moment they just stand in silence and count the waves rushing back and forth, shattering against the crop of rocks. Silence doesn't usually disturb Cloud but now he feels a little anxious, like this silence is not silent at all, people are screaming, but he just can't hear. Eventually he asks Aerith, "What are you thinking about?"

Aerith takes a moment before answering.

"Do you think," she starts, slowly, like she's trying to solve a puzzle. "You and me. Do you think… we made too many wrong choices along the way?"

"Wrong choices?"

"It might have been right at the time, I don't know. But now… now we're somewhere we don't recognize, and we can't find the way back."

Cloud wants to say no, for her sake, but something stops him; he hesitates. He thinks, for a moment, that she is crying – but when he blinks, her eyes are dry and it's only the blow of wind that confuses him, sending her hair flying everywhere. Without thinking he reaches out and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. She looks at him for what seems like a very long moment, although it is no more than a few seconds.

"I wish I could've met you sooner," she says. Her voice has an air of finality to it, so that Cloud chokes on any words he might have said. There is nothing to say, really, but to nod, and a particularly strong whiff of wind blows past them and he suddenly realizes that the summer is ending.

_-_

_Sir Francis was, as many would say, the bravest knight in the land. After hearing about the princess's plight, he vowed to the king that he would find her, and rescue her. He would gladly suffer and fight whatever came his way, and finally fight the grandest dragon that ever lived, to return the princess to her home. The king was delighted to hear this. He promised him much glory and gold, but Sir Francis declined and said that he wasn't doing it for either glory or gold. He only wanted the princess to be safe._

_-_

"Hi, Biggs. It's me."

" _Oh, hey, Tifa. How's it going?"_ Biggs sounds surprised, but also glad. Tifa is immediately guilty that she didn't call often enough. They exchange their current states (Biggs is doing great, working hard and being proud; Tifa replies that it's all the same with her) and Tifa congratulates him on – getting away, though she gracefully words it something different; getting your dream. I'm so happy you got your dream, Biggs.

" _Well, not yet,"_ Biggs says, but his voice is proud.  _"But I'm getting there. So was there a reason you called?"_

"Yes. Yes, it's Cloud's birthday tomorrow. I thought I might throw him a small party, you know, nothing fancy. He'd love it if you were there, too."

" _Yeah, okay."_ Biggs agrees easily, like Tifa thought he would. Then, _"Hey, is he alright?"_

"What? Yeah, he's fine," Tifa hopes she doesn't sound dismissive or paranoid. Or anything, really, but casual. "So could you be there? At that bar we – I mean Cloud and I – first met."

" _Sure. Take care, Tifa."_

After Biggs she calls Aerith. Aerith will probably already know about his birthday, she thinks, and she might even be planning to throw him some extravagant, enchanting birthday party in some fairy forest. But Tifa's calling her first, and she's feeling defiant. A strange relentless energy had been crowding and then leaving her for the past few days, ever since she heard Cloud play that piano. One minute she would barely have the strength to stretch her lips into a smile, and then the next she would be the rebel; daring the world to move around her, daring herself to hold on to life as it did a frantic dance. It is in this spirit now that she dials Aerith's number, but she doesn't pick up. After a minute of waiting Tifa gives up and leaves a voice mail. Maybe her battery's out.

There are currently no customers (the business is bad of late, what with their losing streak finally making the news), so Tifa is sneaking the shop's supply of wrapping paper and blue ribbon to wrap Cloud's birthday gift. She has bought him a small black notebook. She doesn't know if he writes anything anywhere still, but the paper is creamy and soft, and it reminds her of old days.

She wonders if she should write a card, but doesn't know what she would put in it. Even as a young girl she had never been good at writing cards or letters. She didn't need to, anyway, because he was always right there. So she leaves the note blank after  _To Cloud,_ save for a short line;  _Happy Birthday._

-

It's a Thursday night and the bar isn't too crowded. Tifa exchanges a hello with Mr. Pamber, orders four drinks, just in case. Aerith is still not picking up and Tifa isn't sure if she's got the message. When Tifa comes back to the table, though, a large group of uniformed soldiers pushes in, laughing and joking. They form a community within themselves, and everybody has suddenly become their beholders. They have the air of a group that knows that they are being watched, even though no one is obviously staring at them. It's become a little bit more common these days; soldiers on short leaves, their uniforms constant reminders that the war is now circling the parameters of the beast of the city. No one, Tifa mends, except for Cloud. He is not bothering to conceal his stare, and Tifa gets worried for him.

"Hey, you okay? We could move." Tifa almost fishes out her phone to call Biggs, but Cloud is shaking his head.

"I'm okay," he says. Tifa, suddenly weary, decides to take his words at face value and sits down across from him.

"I tried calling Aerith. She isn't answering. Did she go somewhere?" She asks, carefully. Cloud shakes his head again. Tifa doesn't know how to read that, and is glad when Biggs pushes open the door. He spares a glance at the loud group of soldiers before making his way to their table, beaming. Tifa smiles back. Before Cloud turns around to find out who it is, Biggs is flopping down in the seat next to Cloud. They are wearing matching plaid shirts, which unexpectedly amuses Tifa. Cloud looks confused, while Biggs is grinning and clapping his shoulder.

"It's been a while, Cloud! How're you doing?"

"I'm – it's nice to see you," Cloud finally settles, with a small smile that seems to surprise Biggs. Tifa remembers that Cloud's smiles had been much more of a rarity back in the days with Biggs; since Aerith, though, Tifa and even Cloud have gotten used to it. "How's the lawyer thing?" He even asks, politely, to which Biggs can't help but let out a surprised laugh.

"Good, good. I didn't think you'd remember. You look well, Cloud. Really."

"I didn't. Remember." Cloud corrects him. "That's why I said the  _lawyer thing._ "

"Close enough, my friend," Biggs says and looks at Tifa meaningfully. "So, here's my gift." He pushes a neatly wrapped (in a brown package paper) bundle toward Cloud. Tifa hastily picks up her own from her bag and stacks it on Biggs's. For a moment, Cloud just stares at the two packages uncomprehendingly.

"What's this for?" He asks, and both Tifa and Biggs laugh. They know him well enough to know that he is not joking, which, in Tifa's flickering thoughts, is the better joke. Although they have gotten used to it – she wishes now that they could have been friends, a long time ago, the three of them in that small village. Would Biggs have become their friend?

"It's your birthday, idiot," Biggs says affectionately. Cloud looks at Tifa then. She tries to decipher his eyes, but they have always been mysteries to her. Blue, once seeped in sky, and like the sky it remolds all the time. Now Tifa thinks it's a light rain, drops here and there while the sun is still out, the color of pale blue and gray in the dim light.

"I can't believe you remembered," he says, with something like reverence, almost. Tifa finds herself shrugging, hiding her embarrassment. She is pleased, though. Biggs catches on and distracts Cloud; he is a good friend.

"Don't tell me you really  _forgot_ , man. I mean, who forgets their birthday?"

"Apparently he does." It's Mr. Pamber, the bartender, approaching them with a tray full of their drinks. He has caught on the end of the conversation, and is grinning good-naturedly at Cloud. He is carrying something else, though. An elegantly wrapped package and a white card flourished with thin gold lines, drawing of a swan. Tifa immediately knows where that's from.

"Here, Cloud, it's from a pretty young lady, she dropped by earlier." Mr. Pamber says, confirming Tifa's speculation. "She says she's sorry she couldn't make it to the party."

"Who is this lady?" Biggs asks, interestedly, glancing at Tifa.

"Her name's Aerith. Mutual friend." Tifa says hastily. For some reason, she doesn't want Cloud to know that she's been talking to Biggs about Aerith. "At least she got my message."

Cloud isn't looking at her, though. He's reading Aerith's card (of course she would write a card; she would be good at it, not like Tifa. She would know exactly what to say), and Tifa tries not to peek and sips her drink. Except Cloud passes her the note after he's done, anyway. Tifa reads it quickly. Cloud is standing up and sitting down again, looking curiously blank.

 _Happy birthday, Cloud,_ it starts.  _I love you and Tifa both very much. I didn't mean to be cruel –_ Tifa has to stop for breath, here, wonders what it means.  _But I have to go away now. I'm leaving with Kye. Take care, Cloud. I wish I'd met you sooner. I wish you don't need a dragon to need a knight, like I did._

Tifa doesn't understand. It's cryptic. It's a puzzle, the codes only known to Cloud and Aerith, but Cloud doesn't explain. He is waiting for Tifa to finish reading. There is only a single word left to read, anyway, and it is crossed out many times, although it's the same word every time.

"Cloud, what's this? What does she mean?" Tifa asks, suddenly scared. She is scared for that expression on his face, that vacancy.

"She's leaving with Kye. That's what it says."

"What about the dragon? No, wait," Tifa gets up, eyes catching the group of soldiers at the bar, laughing and talking. "Kye is in the army, right? Maybe one of them knows him."

Cloud doesn't say anything, and doesn't follow Tifa as she makes her way between tables and approaches the soldiers. A few of them look up curiously as Tifa gets closer.

"Excuse me," she says. Her voice still sounds calm. Her head is spinning, like she's had a whole bottle of whiskey infused with hazelnut coffee. "Does any of you know Kye Blue?"

"What's that, a perfume brand?" One of them jokes, but stops laughing when he sees Tifa's face. She doesn't want to imagine how she might be looking now. All she can feel is the silence behind her, all her senses sharp and tuned to him sitting there not saying anything. She wants to find Aerith for him. She wants to find Aerith and Kye together.

"It's a person. Have you heard of him? He's in the army."

Many of them shake their heads. Some are too drunk to understand her question. One person screws up his eyes as if to remember, says it sounds vaguely familiar but can't place it. Tifa sees that it is hopeless. She turns back, only to find Biggs alone and looking bewildered in their table. Her heart slides a little, as she hurries back. He hasn't taken anything else but he has taken the book that Aerith has sent.

"Where is he?" Tifa asks, impatiently.

"He just went out." Biggs points to the door. "Is everything okay?"

"I'm sorry, Biggs. I'll tell you later." She runs out before her words have finished scattering in the thick haze of the bar. The door swings open easily, and the night air has turned icy, almost, in the sharp turn of a season. The darkness is shallow and rustling, like satin. Tifa finds Cloud standing not far from the entrance, against the brick wall confused with colorful graffiti. He looks up when Tifa walks towards him.

"I was waiting for you," he says.

"I asked those soldiers about Kye. They've never heard of him, except for this one guy…"

Cloud stops her with a look, like he always does. He hands her the book, the wrapping paper destroyed to reveal a beautiful storybook, blue and gold.

"What's this?" Tifa asks, taking it. Cloud opens a page for her to read. It is too dark to distinguish the blurs of the pictures, but the letters and thick and large. The streetlight is just bright enough to read. Tifa is confused, but Cloud doesn't explain so she bends over the black letters. Like poetry. Like she is hoping to understand something she can't remember.

-

_The dragon was the most stunning creature Sir Francis had ever seen. His scales were deep sapphire and emerald, glistening in the pale sunlight and exploding like the ocean. He was a vicious creature. He was a cursed beast. Sir Francis unsheathed his sword, made up of the finest silver in the land, and held it up bravely in front of him. He was terrified of the creature before him, but he thought of the young princess and her only._

" _I am Sir Francis," he said. "I will die before I let you destroy me!"_

_The great dragon bent his head slowly towards him._

" _Brave human," he spoke deeply, like mountains moving. "I am the oldest dragon you will ever meet. My name is Kye Blue."_

-

Her house is empty. It is big and neat and empty, and very quiet. Tifa still finds it beautiful, the darkness stooping over the corners of the rooms and the electric lamps not quite touching it. It is a terrible kind of beauty, though, a little frightening, and she thinks of Kye Blue. In the end Aerith had been broken too. The house is too large and too empty. There are so many rooms.

Cloud goes to the library to put the book back. Tifa doesn't think Aerith is coming back. The door had been open and the house feels abandoned, like it had been empty for hundreds of years and every fake candle and rug tassels know it, know they are alone and they will not be disturbed. Tifa wanders to the rest of the house and tries to imagine people living here. The beautiful red-haired girl she was so desperately jealous of. Her mother and father, people before her. Someone who built this house, once upon a time, someone who painted the lattice window in the picture and the light that looks accidentally beautiful. Someone who must have placed that brick upon the others, beneath others. She can't imagine any of them. The house feels like it has simply existed over centuries, over time and space and was never not there. It is empty. She shudders.

In one of the rooms she finds jewelry. There is nothing else in the room but some old cabinets, and some ancient desks and a dressing table. The mirror is thick with gray dust and is cracked. The tables, though, are full of red and white and green and blue jewelry that look clean and shine in the moonlight that comes through the long wall windows. Stars. Dreams. They are beautiful, golden violet necklaces and intense blue-stoned rings and dragonfly brooches with pearls for eyes and pale pink lights. They are all clean, and beautiful, and none of them look used. Tifa leaves before their whispers get too loud.

-

There is an extra page at the end. It looks different to the rest of the book. This page is more simple, the edges not trimmed by swirling golden patterns. There is an illustration that looks only half-finished. Cloud can't tell if it is supposed to be a castle or a moon. He doesn't know why this page is different. It does not fit, yet it is there, as part of the book, and is just as well-worn as the rest of the pages. Aerith has read it many times. The story has finished with a happily ever after. Sir Francis has killed the great dragon, the princess was rescued and they fell in love. They lived a long and happy life, two boys and a girl. Sir Francis lived eighty years and Lady Terra lived five more years. The story has ended but there is an extra page.

_Lady Terra lay in her bed, looking out at the moon. The sky was black but she knew it would be blue again in the morning. She has now lived eighty five years in this world. She knew that the end was coming, and she welcomed it finally. She drew her last breath and was at peace. She would finally see him again, that majestic dragon who had stolen the sky for her._

Cloud reads it many times. He tries to imagine it, the Lady with a smile on her face, and the secret she had kept. He had not read this last page before. The only page he'd glimpsed at had the name  _Kye Blue_ and Cloud thinks he might have realized, then, without really knowing it. He stands up, finally, and puts the book back on the table just like he's found it the first time. The library is empty and quiet. Moonlight spills sounds instead of soft rain tonight. The house is too big and too empty. He closes the door behind him as he leaves. Cloud and Tifa don't speak a word as they walk back to their homes, only a whispering  _goodnight_ at the end of the line that is almost lost to the night and the moon.

-

Cloud finds a stack of stuff in front of his door, with a note on top. He picks them up. It is from Biggs, hoping everything is okay and delivering his birthday presents for him. He has never gotten more than one present for his birthday. For a long time it was only Tifa and her clumsy attempts at pictures and knitting, then it was Zack and his ration of protein bars. This year he has two – even without the one he's put back.  _Hope everything is okay._ Cloud thinks it is strange, that he really is. He is sad but he is okay. He takes the two presents and closes the door. He doesn't turn on the light, just the small bedside lamp that is more orange than yellow, and sits down on the bed. He opens Biggs's present. Simple brown paper, neatly taped together, and a book. It's a novel that Cloud had never heard of before. He stares at the title. White Heaven.

There is a short note wishing him happy birthday.  _I remember you said you liked to read._ Cloud finds it strange, again, that Biggs remembers such trivial information about him. The piece of thought that he has sliced and let slip, filed away inside someone else like a block of toy. Held against one another until they form a castle, like a sand castle but much stronger. Disconnected pieces. Some of them are their own, but only some. Only some of them. They had all made heavens to take away their madness. A lonely girl had made a dragon come alive. A confused boy had known that Kye wasn't real – he can't fool himself now – but he pretended, nonetheless. He built a shrine around the smiling face of her and made her his heaven. He had been happy to pretend. Maybe a part of him already knew that it wouldn't last forever, that it was bound to crash. He hadn't been that surprised to find it burning today, this night, a man who has come home to find his home burn and watches it calmly. He dimly remembers leaving a matchstick burning, imagines the flame catching onto the carpet and the wooden frames of family photos. From the ashes of his paradise, though, strangely enough, he tastes something else not quite bitter. Cloud puts the book down. He already likes it, even though he hasn't even read the black blurb. He like the title. The pretending and the loving, the holding on. Burning house and burning pictures. Cloud thinks he will call and tomorrow and thank him. For his generosity and his patience, that he has never expected from anyone other than the one who couldn't give it to him, his mother, and for remembering that he liked to read. Like a block of red and yellow toy.

Cloud picks up Tifa's smaller bundle next. It is beautifully wrapped, although the blue ribbon has the department store logo and she has tried to hide it, but it doesn't matter. Cloud carefully undresses the ribbon and the paper and finds a black leather journal. There is no note after the  _Happy birthday_  but Cloud imagines the next part.  _I remember you liked to write._ The black journal that he had filled cover to cover, writing over writing just to write and it was okay that letters over letters canceled each other out because he always wrote just to write, never to read. He can't remember most of what he has written. It was something to do, something to bleed into and hide under his books. It was black, so the blood didn't seep out, it was stained but never showed. Tifa remembered. Tifa, the only one who would listen, with the generosity and patience he didn't expect from anyone else but the one who couldn't give it to him. Cloud thinks he is kidding himself if he says he doesn't know. The sea breeze in her hair, weeks ago, and the crispier mountain wind in her eyes and mouth, years ago. Even back then he knew. He never wanted to know, though, so he pretended. Like he had seen the name  _Kye Blue_ in Aerith's storybook, one day he had seen her staring at him with the dying sun in her eyes, but he pretended not to have seen it. It had been easier that way. Cloud thumbs through the notebook and it is completely empty from the first page to last, not even an address page at the back. The paper is light and smooth, and it looks flawlessly white even in the tainted orange light of his lamp.

Did he love Aerith? Maybe. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't, and pretended, and watched from afar and admired the white rim around her eyes, the halo of her laughter. If she were here he would have followed her anywhere. He would have burned with her – but she burned out first, leaving him behind. Did Tifa love him? Maybe.

Or she loved how his almost-white hair broke in the sunshine and how they would sit for hours not saying anything, not doing anything, letting the world pass by. Cloud might be a dent in the road just big enough to hide and catch her breath. He will not stay. He will not burn with her. He will crash for her, she who has somehow made a heaven out of him. Saw a light and thought it was his halo. But it wasn't. It was just the sun, in his eyes and mouth.

-

The next morning, Cloud doesn't come to work. The manager asks about him to her, in a tired voice, and it is like a déjà vu of before. Only there is no Biggs anymore, and a season has passed between that time. It is only a season but it feels like forever ago.

After work Tifa goes to his place, because that is what she did the last time. Last time she stood in front of her door and knocked and called for a half an hour. This time it isn't raining, just a gray overcast sky dripping the last bit of summer. Tifa knocks and calls but no one answers. This time she has a spare key.

Cloud's room is empty. Tifa has had the key but has never used it before. She doesn't know why Cloud gave it to her, except for this, alone – to say goodbye without meeting her eyes. His house is neat, like no one has ever lived in it. There, she recognizes the painting on the wall they have bought together, at a subway station. The bed is neat. The sheets are spotless white and the pillows are square and motionless. It is a déjà vu. After Cloud left, the first time, she had gone to his house. To search for anything, any piece, that he might left behind. With Mira gone the house was empty and unlocked. The kitchen was clean. The bathrooms were clean. The living room was neat save for a couple of books on the floor strewn about. She tried looking for Cloud's room but it wasn't there. There was Mira's bedroom. There was no other bedroom. All that time, she had not known that he didn't have a room.

Tifa turns the light off. She knows he isn't coming back. There might have been a note on the striped blue and white blanket, but she doesn't check. She closes the door behind her and walks out. She knows he isn't coming back.

Outside, it is raining. Just a drizzle. The wind is crisp now, though, and a few leaves are turning orange. Some are dead on the ground and Tifa steps on them. The air is cold. She shivers. She thinks she wants to go somewhere, somewhere warm, because the summer has ended now. She doesn't like summer but she likes the warmth. Time is suspended in summer, hanging lower than usual and swinging slower than usual. Now it's over, though, unless she goes looking for it somewhere else. An island, maybe.

"I could," she speaks aloud. There is no one on the streets to hear her. The wind rustles and a shutter jingles somewhere, a pipe creaks somewhere.

She could go anywhere. Like Biggs said. Do anything and still have enough time to regret it. It makes her laugh. But the rain makes water fall on her cheeks, like teardrops. Because she would have stayed. She would have waited forever, if he'd asked.

Tifa steps on a piece of glass, broken bottle, and it cracks beneath her feet. She pauses. It occurs to her that she had never told him about the dream. The one with the grapefruit. Now whenever she sees a grapefruit she will inevitably think of him. The fireworks. The scarlet juice and the fireworks. He has claimed the color red, too. As if the sky wasn't big enough. As if the ocean wasn't wide enough.

Rain falls. Tifa thinks it is the rain.

 


	8. Chapter 8

Epilogue

-

_It's a small village under a mountain. They say the river freezes in January, here, too. And white flowers, someone said I should look for them here._

-

"You lost, miss?" A young boy, no more than twelve, his eyes friendly and brown. She smiles at him and offers him a sip of hot chocolate she is holding. The boy takes a sip, and it leaves a chocolate brown mustache above his lips. The smell of it whirls into the crispy air in a white smoke.

"I'm looking for someone, actually. His name is – "

"I know who you're looking for!" The boy says, delighted, and takes her hand. The village is small and quiet, clean, almost like it's newly born. There are flowers that bloom in winters, white flowers, or so she has been told. She has never been this far up North before. The air is more vicious, even though it is only autumn yet, and people sound strange to her ears.

"How do you know that?" Tifa wonders.

"You speak the same way. You an' Mr. Strife," the boy says confidently, proud of his own deductions. Tifa is a little impressed. His name, though expected, sends a shiver down her back, but it could just be the cold. She finds that she is calm, after all these years. She lets the boy lead her to a quieter alley where flowers might peek between cobblestone passages in springtime. The sky looks like snow is about to fall.

"Here it is," the boy points to the house at the far left. It is a small house, a little bit apart from the rest, but sturdy and pretty. Tifa gives the rest of the hot chocolate to the boy, walks up the short way to the front door. The gravels are neat and even though it is almost winter, the leaves of the trees are strangely green. She knocks.

The door opens, after a beat. It is a small house. Tifa sees the door swinging inward as if in slow motion, and her eyes find his before he can find her. He has not changed, much; his hair is a little shorter, so that his eyes are visible, and oddly enough – Tifa finds him wearing a black, short-sleeved t-shirt and jeans. Even though it is almost winter, and the cold air must rush at his face and tickle his cheeks but he is wearing short sleeves. His arms are mutated and scarred, like some elaborate tattoo, and Tifa stares. She stares. Suddenly she feels her heart beating again. He stares back, for a moment surprised, his blue eyes wide and silent.

"Tifa," he says, finally, and steps aside. Tifa lets herself in. The floorboards creak; the clock on the wall ticks; the door closes behind her, but the window is open; Tifa feels everything. The wind is biting. She pulls off her red woolen scarf, though, and he takes it absently, still staring at her face.

"How did you – "

"How did I find you?" Tifa says, her voice coming out light and supple, like it is a part in a play she has practiced many times. "I guess I know you better than you think."

"Well, I mean – "

"Just kidding, Artie told me," Tifa takes a deep breath. The air smells of wood. "I'm glad you kept in touch with him."

"I tried to –"

It's amusing to see Cloud flounder; he is composed, usually, has calculated ahead an entire conversation in his head, but not today. Tifa laughs. She is nervous and exhilarated at the same time, everything so sharp –

"Well, I found you anyway."

"You found me," Cloud echoes, still confused. They are both standing near the door, him rubbing his arm almost unconsciously, her grabbing her purse tightly. She swallows. Takes out the gift-wrapped package from her bag, and it rustles as Cloud takes it.

"What is it?" He asks.

"Something I had to give back to you," Tifa says defiantly. She  _is,_ in a way, a part of a play. She has practiced this bit many times. "I hope you understand why."

Cloud unwraps the package, too slowly, and the army-string falls out. The army-string with thirty seven pearls neatly sewn on it. Cloud pauses.

"Well, I mean – I've never seen the actual necklace before – before it fell apart," he says, cautiously, but there is a smudge of humor in his voice and Tifa breathes a sigh of relief. "But I'm pretty sure it didn't look like this."

"No. Well, you didn't get the string back." Tifa says. She takes a deep breath. "I had to give it back to you, because – "

"I know, Tifa." Cloud says quietly. Tifa is robbed of words, robbed of some momentous glory, and is indignant for a second. Then the second passes. She sees that Cloud has – changed, in some way, in three years. His hair is darker. Even his eyes seem to be a shade darker, but there is something else, too.

"You know." Tifa repeats.

"You came looking for me," Cloud wonders. His fingers are tracing those thirty seven pearls, then adds, almost as an afterthought, "You know, I  _did_ find that thirty-eighth pearl."

This takes Tifa off her balance. She feels the ground breaking, her careful script diverted. Stolen. He is always making new scenes, adding new lines. She is nervous again.

"What, you did? Why didn't you give it to me?"

"'Cause I wanted to keep it," Cloud shrugs, as if that should have been obvious. Tifa gapes at him, realizes she must be looking like an idiot and hastens to make up some words.

"What – I mean,  _why_?"

"Because…" Cloud looks at the string of pearls again. He seems to be counting them again and again. There is a pause in which Tifa feels her courage dissolve. Her calmness. She'd thought she'd finally figured it all out, her feelings and his feelings and – and now.

And now, there it is, suddenly that light through the gray window, the winter light, and it splashes onto his hair. My God, she thinks, he is beautiful. His pale skin gleams almost blindingly in the light. His hair breaks, his eyes break, the pearls in his hand and the grotesque coronation on his arms – slowly, all the colors are deleted, washed out, leave only white. White. Suddenly she has a vision of something; of him grown old, his hair drained and white, his eyes glazed and wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. The winter sun still shining on him, still illuminating him, still beautiful. Still. Tifa blinks. Words tumble out of her mouth, an inspired moment, unscripted.

"I could wait all that time."

"What?" Cloud is confused. He is back to the present, with a blink, the sudden vision of white gone. Tifa stares at him.

"What were you going to say?" She asks instead, blinking slowly.

Cloud considers her. Slowly, deliberately, he gives the necklace – the string with thirty seven pearls – back to her. Tifa takes her almost without realizing it, because she would take anything Cloud handed to her, and watches Cloud take a deep breath.

"I thought I would free you," he says. Tifa realizes he is explaining, for once, explaining his flight. She listens with everything she has; the tips of her eyelashes, the air that passes her lungs.

"I thought you were… seeing me, differently."

"Differently?" Tifa asks. Cloud misses her eyes, and looks out the window at the pale sky.

"Yeah. Wrongly. Like how I was, before." Unbroken. He turns his head. Tifa meets his eyes, his pale eyes of blue and sees there something flickering. The moment stretches, like it so often does with Cloud. It is a light, a tremor, that he tries to hold back and can't. Memory, regret, fear. Tifa recognizes all that – she just has never thought to look for them in Cloud, too. That makes her smile. She feels the tension leave her body. Cloud watches her, silent, and his intensity in that moment frees her; like he had intended, but not by going away. He frees her with his being, there, in front of her. It makes her brave. She takes a breath, and speaks.

"I know what you mean. I don't think I am, but maybe – I don't know. The thing is, Cloud," she looks him in the eyes. "I can wait forever, if you only ask."

"How could I ask that?" Cloud wonders. There is a different sort of light in his eyes, the kind that gleams and not flickers, and Tifa recognizes that too. All her life Cloud had been a mystery to her; a natural force, a landslide – now, she thinks she just might not have been looking. She had preferred to imagine the shadows on his face, but now she sees; she remembers that momentary vision, of the lines around his eyes.

Tifa has been searching for the right words to say all this time. The words to make him understand, that he will always be good enough, but she has failed time and again. She had gotten them wrong, made him leave, but now she has found him again. Now, she realizes that words are only vibrations of the air that travel through the air, sometimes not quite fast enough.

"You know what," Tifa decides. "Never mind. Don't."

"What?"

"Don't – ask. What is that smell?"

Cloud looks round, automatically, looking a little bewildered. Tifa feels triumphant; free. She wants to laugh, so she does, while Cloud locates the source of the burning smell. He had been cooking something before Tifa came in, completely forgotten in the surprise.

"Damn it, that was my last egg," Cloud murmurs, making towards it. Tifa sees that it is crinkled and brown, like an abandoned shell of some ancient creature.

"Well – don't you have anything else in the house?" Tifa asks. She sees a refrigerator and heads towards it. Cloud glances at her, not exactly surprised, but amused rather, and doesn't say anything. She opens the door and looks; there really is nothing much but a small bunch of leftover greens and a can of tuna. "Impressive," she says. Cloud shrugs as if he is embarrassed.

"Well, I wasn't expecting anybody."

"Doesn't matter. I can make something out of this," Tifa decides. She takes them all out, feeling Cloud's eyes on her.

"You can make something out of this," Cloud repeats, like it is an immense sentence containing the equation of space time, ripples. Tifa looks up. He is looking at her, and then he smiles; unexpectedly, something that breaks through the surface. Tifa feels herself following him. She would follow him anywhere. She suddenly feels ridiculously warm. Although the window is still open and the almost-winter is cracking the back of her hands.

Then she gets curious about something. "Hey –  _Mr. Strife_ – what do you do around here?"

"Oh, I do all sorts of things," Cloud says easily, handing her a bowl before she asks for it. Tifa takes it, as if they have done this a thousand times before; maybe they have, and maybe they had just been too distracted to notice what they were doing, each lost in their own dreams. Cloud hesitates, looks at her as if daring her to laugh. "I teach, for one."

Tifa laughs. She can't help it. "What do you teach?"

"Math," Cloud says solemnly, and then realizing what he said, breaks out in a grin also.

"I hate math," Tifa says.

"I know." Cloud says. "Maybe – " he hesitates. He doesn't quite know what to say. It doesn't matter, anyway, because he doesn't have to ask. All her life Tifa had been waiting for the right words, but sometimes they are not fast enough and it doesn't matter.

"Maybe I could get a job here – at a diner or something. There  _is_  a diner, right?" She says.

"Yeah," Cloud says, a little taken aback, a little amused, maybe. Suddenly, Tifa remembers her dream.  _There is a glow in his eyes, that's shaped like a grapefruit._

"Why are you smiling?" She asks, almost automatically. The last time, she remembers, she had woken up before he could answer. She imagines a thousand trickles of honey, weaving webs in the air, making it heavy. She imagines a thousand things he could say. Finally, after all this time, the two of them facing each other over a bowl of cold vegetables and a can of tuna.

"Because," Cloud says, and shrugs. "You are."

 


End file.
